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2014

Adapting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

Nostalgia for a Childhood at Never Was

Helen M. Bendix

Bard College

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Recommended Citation

Bendix, Helen M., "Adapting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Nostalgia for a Childhood 7at Never Was" (2014). Senior Projects

Fall 2014. Paper 42.

h8p://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2014/42

Adapting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

Nostalgia for a Childhood That Never Was

Senior Project submitted to

The Division of Languages and Literature

and

The Division of Social Studies

Of Bard College

Helen Bendix

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

December 2015

Acknowledgements

To Deirdre D’Albertis, for putting up with endless pages of drafts and always having something

encouraging to say

To Diana Brown, for asking me difficult questions and reassuring me I didn’t need to know all

the answers

To Maria Cecire, for always finding the sources that I needed

To my mother, for providing endless support and pictures of our cats when necessary

To my father, for giving advice and logistical aid

To my sister, for reminding me why I chose this instead of science

To Fabi, for listening to me complain

To Karen and family, for giving me a place to stay on holidays

To everyone at Bard who made being here unforgettable

And to everyone at home who made finishing up worth it

Thank you.

Table of Contents

Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1

1. “The Happy Hours of Childhood” ...........................................................................................5

1.1 Who is Alice, and Why Can’t She Remember Her Lessons? ................................................5

1.2 The Author and his Imagined Audience ..............................................................................10

1.3 Context and Text in a State of Mutual Affectation ..............................................................14

2. “I Must Have Changed Several Times Since Then” .............................................................26

2.1 “All in the Golden Afternoon” .............................................................................................26

2.2 “Some New Line of Fairy-Lore” .........................................................................................31

3. “What is the Use of a Book Without Pictures?” ...................................................................39

3.1 Knowing by Seeing: Illustration as an Epistemological Tool .............................................39

3.2 Reimagining the Author Through His Images .....................................................................47

3.3 The Film Industry, the 20

Century Child, and Alice ..........................................................52

3.4 A Very Unhappy Unbirthday – Alice’s Second Origin .......................................................57

4. “Some of the Words Have Got Altered” ................................................................................65

4.1 Alice Adaptation: Commonalities and Inconsistencies .......................................................65

4.2 “Narrativizing” – Plot Conventions in Film Media .............................................................75

5. “She, Too, Began Dreaming After a Fashion” ......................................................................83

5.1 Alice Fans Describe Themselves .........................................................................................83

5.2 “The Carrollians”: Consumers, Producers, and Interpretive Community ...........................91

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................110

Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................113

Appendix A .................................................................................................................................121

Appendix B .................................................................................................................................137

Appendix C .................................................................................................................................147

Introduction

“He presented the green leather booklet containing the neatly handscripted text to Alice

in 1864 as a Christmas gift, a year and a half after the break with the Liddells” (Cohen

126).

Morton Cohen, a leading biographer of Lewis Carroll, describes the first edition of

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (then titled Alice’s Adventures Underground) thus: a humble

gift to the daughter of an estranged friend. More than that, a painstakingly handcrafted gift; a

personal token. The sort of writing, in essence, which rarely achieves the level of commercial

success Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland did. One would think its lasting cultural impact and

maintained popularity would be equally unlikely for such a personal work, but considering other

works of children’s literature released after Alice, a trend is evident. Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh,

and even in a way C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books all reveal direct connections between an adult

author and a child subject who became a focal point in the books, the Llewelyn Davies boys for

J. M. Barrie, his own son for A. A. Milne, and children who were evacuated to his house during

World War II for C. S. Lewis.

The personal level these books are imbued with provides the impression of something

readers long for – a direct link between author and audience, an intent on the author’s part

unrelated to commercial success, an authenticity to the textual object as an artifact created out of

love and without agenda. Alice stands out as a forerunner among these, being the first, but also

being the most frequently adapted. All four works were popularly adapted by the Walt Disney

company, though the Narnia movies were live-action and released significantly later, while the

other three were animated films released in the 1950s. And yet, only Peter Pan can boast

anything approaching the wealth of adaptation Alice enjoys, and even then, most of these follow

the formula of Disney’s version.

What is it about these books in particular that has sparked such a response, lasting a

century and a half? The obvious commonality lies with their authors – biographical work on both

Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie has debated back and forth about the relationship of the authors

with their child subjects for the last several decades. Alice’s popularity, then, is not only

predicated by its humble origins, but also by questions surrounding it. This is exacerbated by two

further facets of Alice. Firstly, the time in which it was created – the Victorian era, a time period

rich in development in terms of the perspective on children and childhood, which has since been,

ironically, romanticized and understood through literary works of the time, Alice foremost

among them. Secondly, Alice is a text rich in images, first hand-drawn by Carroll himself in the

edition he gave Alice Liddell for Christmas. Later, when the book was published commercially,

John Tenniel provided illustrations. The images and the text are placed on equal footing,

especially to child readers, who may form a stronger attachment to images if they cannot read

yet. In later versions, the implications of Alice as an entirely visual medium in film or illustration

will come to the fore.

In order to approach the question of why a book like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

stays relevant and subject to frequent revision, a certain acknowledgement of the unbelievable

scope of the question is necessary. I chose to approach the subject by first discussing how it stays

relevant. The components, quotes and tropes of Alice are very distinct, iconic even, making a

reference to Alice easy to spot and an adaptation of Alice guided by a set of standard,

recognizable features. Tracing Alice’s influence as both a written and visual medium since its

birth in 1865 reveals a rich history of literary works, scholarly analysis, film adaptation and

transformative work released online. The basis of this influence is revealed in a number of ways

– originally, in Carroll’s own stated desire to counter the didactic trends of children’s literature

and education at the time he was writing, giving Alice both a place in literary history and a status

out of time as a book formed without the desire or intention for fame or a place within a canon,

ironically given a place as a forming part of the canon of children’s literature for exactly this

reason.

A century and a half later, Alice fans globally still read, enjoy and respond to Carroll’s

original work, but more than that, they respond to a myriad of other works released in the

interim, based on or inspired by Carroll’s original work. Furthermore, they create their own

works, they interact with scholarship on the subject, and they state, frequently and clearly, their

own stakes in scholarly debates surrounding Alice and, more frequently, Carroll himself. The

developments leading to this point can be traced in a number of different ways, through the list

of film adaptations of Alice, the collected academic works on the subject, through the reactions

fans have to these works. In my project, I will begin by describing the circumstances of Alice’s

origins and discussing how the interpretation thereof has changed in recent years. I will discuss

the adaptations of Alice which are most well-remembered and examine how the trends in

portraying Alice have shifted over the years, and I will conclude by situating these trends among

their modern audience with the help of a survey I conducted among Alice fans.

These adults looking back at Alice, though nowadays they first encountered it as a film,

usually the Disney one, express a longing for the idyll they see Alice representing – a type of

childhood that Alice has come to represent that existed neither in the Victorian period nor even

within the book itself, but which has been collectively imagined by audiences for decades.

Filmmakers recreate Alice in film over and over, searching for a version that captures the

innocence they see in the original; bloggers claim Carroll’s words for their own biographies and

analyze his with a fine-toothed comb. Alice is a focal point of nostalgia both for a historical

period and for a collective notion of what childhood means, even when neither existed as they

are imagined. The rumors surrounding Carroll’s biography only exacerbate this – those who

believe them cite this as a cause to dismantle the aura of purity surrounding Alice, to form darker

and more adult adaptations. Those who believe in Carroll’s innocence refute the claims and

strengthen their ties to the understanding of an innocent childhood they pull from the text. Alice

becomes a child text rather than a children’s text, a space for competing claims on how nostalgia

and childhood ought to be understood.

What is at stake in this analysis is not necessarily reaching a comprehensive answer as to

how and why Alice became the phenomenon it is today. Rather, through the points of focus set in

academic work discussing Alice, the trends within adaptation of Alice and the way fans speak

about Alice, I hope to begin providing an overview of the how and a few indicators as to the why

at least among Alice fans. In this process, my main goal is to establish how changing

understandings of a text and the themes of said text, in this case childhood, change the way a text

is understood. In a way, this then means that the interpretive community reading Alice defines

the book, but they define it in such a way that to them, it also becomes a definition of childhood,

especially female childhood in Victorian England. This definition might not be accurate either to

Victorian England or to childhood as this community of readers experienced it themselves, but it

is taken as true in order to not destabilize the emotional attachment to the book. Alice is

redefined over and over by the context in which she is read, but she is presented by her readers as

a pure, unchanging object of nostalgia in order to disguise the broader cultural changes

‘childhood’ and ‘nostalgia’ are undergoing.

1. “The Happy Hours of Childhood”

1.1 Who is Alice, and Why Can’t She Remember Her Lessons?

“I must have been changed for Mabel! I’ll try again and say ‘How doth the little – ‘,” and

she crossed her hands on her lap, as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but

her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used

to do. (Carroll 23)

What child, when faced with an unfamiliar situation as Alice is here, immediately begins

to question who she might have been turned into? Why would a child so unsure of herself and so

fixated on her lessons capture the imagination of the world? What exactly is it about Alice that

makes her so inescapably compelling? I do not claim to be able to answer any of these questions

fully over the course of this chapter, but they lie at the core of the material I will examine. Alice

emerges from the intersect of the education her author, Lewis Carroll, received, as well as the

treatment of children he observed over the course of the 19

century. It is this context which I

establish in order to understand Alice’s focus on her lessons, and her inability to remember them.

This is only one side of the story, however – as much as Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland is influenced by the historical circumstances surrounding its inception, the way it is

perceived now is influenced by current beliefs about that historical circumstance. Through both

these layers of historical understanding, the role of the child at the time and the belief in who the

child is at a fundamental level becomes intertwined, leaving the heavy weight of multiple

contexts and multiple perceptions resting on Alice’s shoulders. Perhaps, then, it is lucky that

Alice doesn’t know who she herself is, that she confuses herself so easily with Mabel, that she

doesn’t recognize her own voice when she tries to speak. Her undefined self is exactly what

allows her author and her readers to see in her what they need to.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a unique piece of writing. The trend

Carroll describing Alice as a character in his article “Alice on the Stage” (qtd. in Gardner 12)

of children’s literature, now ubiquitous, was only just beginning when Alice was released, and

was at the time largely dominated by didactic work. Alice, written by Charles Dodgson, alias

Lewis Carroll, and illustrated by John Tenniel, was published in 1865. While technically, the

first edition, Alice’s Adventures Underground, was a hand-bound, hand-written gift from Carroll

to Alice Liddell in 1862, by the time the first copy was sold, the text had undergone a series of

significant changes. It had been illustrated extensively by Tenniel, already a well-known artist in

his own right, to Carroll’s painstaking specifications (cf. Cohen 129); it had been retitled Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland, and Carroll had significantly expanded the content, including new

scenes, including the Mad Tea Party.

The second edition, the first having been recalled due to Tenniel’s protest at the

“disgraceful printing” (Cohen 130), sold far better than expected by both writer and publisher,

and received “unconditional praise” (Cohen 131) from the press. Morton Cohen, a leading

Carroll biographer, cites largely positive reviews, such as the Reader calling Alice an “artistic

treasure” (qtd. in Cohen 131) or the Guardian declaring it “so graceful and full of humour that

one can hardly help reading it through” (qtd. in Cohen 131). Jackie Wullschläger, meanwhile,

reports that the books’ critical reception was “luke-warm” (Wullschläger 54). Either way, the

book sold astonishingly well, though its success was slower and conveyed more by word-of-

mouth than would be the case with a modern bestseller. The success of the first book prompted

Carroll to write its sequel, five years later – Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found

There. Once again, the book was greeted with both critical and commercial success, and, if

Cohen is to be believed, little controversy at the time of its release.

What about this book made it so successful not only as fantasy but also as a staple classic

in children’s books? The first place to examine this is to see what within the text has made it so

approachable for a child audience. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland begins with the act of

reading, though it is not Alice who is doing it. Her sister, with whom she is sitting by the

riverbank, is reading a book that Alice is disinterested in because “it had no pictures or

conversations in it” (Carroll 11); she cannot see the point of such a book. Alice is, according to

Through the Looking-Glass, seven and a half years old (cf. Carroll 209), so perhaps too young

for a book without pictures or even a book as complex as Alice’s Adventures. At any rate, this

opening cements Alice as an ideal reader for her own story; it has both endless amounts of

dialogue as well as memorable, unique (for the time) illustrations with an integral place in the

text. It also contains some stylistic inventions of Carroll’s to make the text more appealing, for

example the mouse’s tale. Here, a mouse Alice encounters tells a story that, on the page, takes

the shape of a mouse-tail

. Additionally, the whole book is episodic, each chapter featuring a

new selection of bizarre Wonderland characters unrelated to the previous ones. The lack of

continuity and heavily visual orientation of the book could be seen as more child-friendly –

depending, of course, on the child and the understanding of child-friendliness in both Carroll’s

society and that of the reader.

In the specific instance of the mouse’s tale, Alice is shown to not be a good reader – the

mouse reaches the end of his tail tale only to tell her she is “not attending” (Carroll 35). Alice

apologizes profusely, but grows frustrated that the mouse is so “easily offended” (Carroll 36).

Her poor reading is also evidenced by her muddling recollections of her lessons, perhaps to say

Alice is not terribly good at paying attention to her sister’s book, her own lessons, or the

Mouse’s lesson. She is concerned with what she perceives to be the proper way to behave, but in

a parody of the manners central to the education of young ladies at the time, consistently offends

See: Appendix A, Fig. 1 and Fig. 3

the creatures of Wonderland – after offending the Mouse, when she meets the Caterpillar she

again wishes she could speak to him without causing offense so easily (cf. Carroll 54). Cohen

sees her as “mirror[ing] her society” (Cohen 137) by showing the type of behavior she sees in

adults to, making Alice’s Adventures something of a learning treatise on the rudeness of adult

behavior and the difficulties faced by the child in Victorian England.

Alice as a book is situated as a text children can enjoy by virtue of both textual traits and

illustrations making it more accessible to children. Alice as a character is situated as a child who

is not good at reading, placing her as a reactive element within the story. This reading disregards

the dream facet of the story; at Carroll’s time, Freudian dream analysis was not yet heard of at

all. Alice’s sister discounts the dream, and thus the entirety of Wonderland, as essentially

ambient noise at the end of the book, saying that even if she were to have this dream herself,

upon awaking “the rattling teacups would change to the tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen's

shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy” (Carroll 131). In the interim, psychoanalysis has

informed many critics’ reading of the text. In Nina Auerbach’s reading, she treats the various

elements of Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world as facets of Alice’s own personality.

Especially the animals reveal Alice’s inner conflict – “While Dinah (Alice’s cat in the real

world) is always in a predatory attitude, most of the Wonderland animals are lugubrious victims;

together, they encompass the two sides of animal nature that are in Alice as well” (Auerbach 36).

One of the main ways in which Alice estranges the characters she meets, especially in the earlier

parts of Wonderland, is by mentioning Dinah and her skills at chasing rats. If the Wonderland

animals that are frightened of Dinah’s mere mention as well as the undoubtedly threatening,

murderous characters such as the Queen of Hearts are both read as parts of Alice’s subconscious,

Alice is granted much more subtlety and depth as a character than other women and children

represented in Victorian fiction. (cf. Auerbach 47). Whether or not Carroll intended her to be

read as such is an entirely different matter.

On the other hand, Carroll was fairly clear about the role of didacticism in his own

writing – namely, that it was not relevant at all, at least for children (this does not mean that

adults couldn’t learn from Alice’s struggles). In fact, Carroll protested against critical attempts to

bring a sense of order into Alice fairly vehemently, saying that “the “why” of this book cannot,

and need not, be put into words. Those for whom a child’s mind is a sealed book […] would read

such words in vain” (qtd. in Cohen 135). Carroll objects to the need for learning to define the

process of reading, allowing the pleasure of the text to supersede any discussion of long-term

benefit. Beyond that, in this statement, Carroll also presents a parallel between a book and a

child’s mind, embodying the objectification of children that historian Marah Gubar considers

central to the Victorian cult of the child. In context with viewing Alice as a pleasure artifact

rather than an educational one, the same could be said of the child’s mind, in that to Carroll it

exists to enjoy and be enjoyed.

If Alice is supposed to be an object containing the essence of childhood, first to Carroll

and now to the reader, rather than becoming a complex figure with motives and power within the

narration understandable to adults, she becomes allergic to analysis. Perhaps this is why Alice’s

poor skills as a reader and difficulties in social situations are never painted as a bad

characteristics on her part, rather as one she cannot control – she herself cannot analyze

situations accurately because she, as a child, is not meant to. It could be said this is because Alice

is more object than person, parroting lessons and manners she has learned, a sort of model of

proper behavior gone awry. This would reflect back to James Kincaid’s standpoint on the subject

of the construction of the child; to him “any image, body, or being we can hollow out, purify,

exalt, abuse, and locate sneakily in a field of desire will do for us as a ‘child’” (Kincaid 5). In

this interpretation, Alice becomes less a person than an empty container of ideas – purity,

innocence, education, behavior and misbehavior. Nonetheless, it remains important that she is a

child, and a famous one at that. This role placed on her by her adult author makes her distinct

from all other literary characters interpreted as having an agenda. In a more positive light, it

could also simply be said that her (mis)adventures portray what Carroll saw as intrinsic

“divinity” (qtd. in Cohen 135) of childhood, removed from the society that is attempting to mold

it into something it isn’t. Alice, crystallized out of Carroll’s ideals of literature as well as the

concept of childhood as it was perceived in Victorian times and the developments in that

construct up until today, is a mirror image for what we want to read in her.

1.2 The Author and his Imagined Audience

Given its influence on the content of Alice, where exactly did Lewis Carroll’s beliefs about

childhood and literature emerge from? In many ways, the text was also a product of Charles

Dodgson’s own life as an academic in the Victorian era. Dodgson, hereafter referred to by his

chosen pseudonym Carroll

, began writing poetry and nonsense early on in his life (cf. Cohen

13). He was the eldest of many siblings and was often charged with caring for younger family

members, leading to his lifelong affinity for children and interest in entertaining them. In terms

of his academic interests, Carroll became a lecturer of mathematics in Oxford as well as a tutor

for a variety of his child-friends; many of the math games and logic puzzles in Alice stem from

this interest. Alice, then, is an educational text in some sense of the word. Especially the first two

chapters of the book, when Alice first falls down the rabbit-hole and then undergoes a number of

While some biographers, notably Morton Cohen, chose to refer to him as “Charles” or “Mr.

Dodgson”, I have decided to refer to him as “Carroll” as I am looking at him in his capacity as an

author rather than at his personal life.

size changes, feature her struggles with remembering her lessons. She begins multiplying

incorrectly, only to stop herself by saying “oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate”

(Carroll 23). Martin Gardner explains in the annotations to Carroll’s text that this could be a

reference to the standard multiplication tables, which “stops with the twelves” (Gardner 23). It

could also be a reference to a more complex mathematical phenomenon in which multiplying the

numbers Alice lists using “a number system with base 42” (Gardner 23), which would not

function with 20. Not only does this serve as an inside joke for mathematicians, it also showcases

Alice’s concept of learning or, more generally, the Victorians’ attitude towards education – it

functions by rote and recitation, and impossibilities are swept aside rather than examined.

Carroll, having both received a Victorian education as well as provided many, given that he

worked as a private tutor for children and an Oxford don, had extensive experience with the

process of education. Though he did have and state a number of problems with didacticism in

literature, he also practiced it in life and was aware of its ramifications and the influence it had

on children, a facet very central to Alice. That is to say, Alice as a character is very much

influenced by Victorian standards of education even if Alice as a book is not meant to be

educational.

Much of both Alice in Wonderland as well as Through the Looking-Glass center on

recitation. Beyond the iconic passages in which Alice misremembers poetry, in these first two

chapters she also contemplates geography, though she cannot remember what longitude and

latitude mean (cf. Carroll 13) or which city is the capital of which country (cf. Carroll 23). In a

way, the academic failure is central to Alice’s experience of Wonderland. The confrontation of a

child with a world in which the lessons from the schoolroom cannot be recalled and would not

apply anyway in some ways mirrors the experience of a child in the adult world. In Morton

Cohen’s biography of Lewis Carroll, his analysis of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is in part

that “the child is at the heart of both stories, as are the child’s observations of […] the adult

world’s insensitive, abusive treatment of the child” (Cohen 137). To Cohen, this style of writing

– complex in language at times, but ultimately meant for children – showcases that Carroll

“keenly appreciated what it was like to be a child in a grown-up society” (Cohen 144). In

essence, in terms of the connection between Alice and the typical Victorian child, Cohen paints

the treatment of children as a dark and gloomy trend of didacticism and Carroll as an

illuminating savior whose insight into the whimsy and fantastical nature of a child’s mind

provided an “antidote” (Cohen 144) to their usual treatment by adults.

Whether or not Carroll was indeed as harsh a critic of child-rearing standards of the time

as Cohen believes, he was not only interested in that aspect of Victorian culture. As an academic,

he was deeply immersed in the political life of the university as well as wider political issues.

Some of the political issues of Carroll’s formative years included the Opium War, parliamentary

reform and the abolition of slavery in the colonies (cf. Cohen 5). While it would be a stretch to

discover any of these as themes in Alice, there exists a certain trend towards viewing single

characters within the book as references to real political or university figures, i.e. Bill the Lizard

as Benjamin Disraeli. The presence of these stand-ins for political figures as well as the rhymes

and poems Alice unintentionally satirizes especially in Wonderland and, to a lesser degree, in

Through the Looking-Glass, are remnants of Victorian interests.

Gardner notes that “with few exceptions the originals have now been forgotten, their

titles kept alive only by the fact that Carroll chose to poke fun at them” (Gardner 23) in reference

Bill the Lizard appears in the fourth chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as one of the

Rabbit’s gardeners; he gets sent up the roof to slide down the chimney, and Alice kicks him back

up.

to the poems satirized in Alice. For instance, the song the Duchess sings in chapter six, beginning

with “speak roughly to your little boy” (Carroll 64) is cited as a reference to a “happily

unremembered” (Gardner 64) poem presumably penned by David Bates entitled “Speak Gently”.

The fact that not even the author of this poem can be entirely verified at this point, though the

version Carroll wrote is still known shows the lasting presence of Carroll’s work in popular

culture. “Speak Roughly” might not even be as well-known as “How Doth the Little Crocodile”

or “You Are Old, Father William”, other poems parodied in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,

and its source may be even obscurer, but it is still occasionally included in film adaptations. Its

content, insisting that children must be treated roughly at all times and punished severely, speaks

to a general idea of parody of Victorian treatment of children, almost making the books more

palatable to modern readers who would reject standards of behavior involving corporal

punishment which were acceptable in Carroll’s times. The Victorian in-jokes and parodies are

painstakingly explained in the Annotated Alice, but have become obscure for most children or

casual readers of the book without annotation; the book has far eclipsed its context, but its

context is remembered through it as a quaintly repressive era. The parody becomes a way to

understand and accept what might otherwise be unacceptable about the time period.

Carroll’s life experience in Victorian England thus provides a host of material now fairly

foreign to readers not well-versed in it. In many other works, this could make it dated, but for

Carroll, there was more at stake than only his context, there was also his imagined audience –

children. Carroll was a friend to and champion for children. He was a great admirer of Tennyson

(cf. Cohen 260), a romantic poet who had much to say on the subject of the innocence of

childhood, but succeeded in alienating him upon their meeting

. Carroll also possessed a number

of views on appropriate material for children, advising an actress who was a former child friend

to “improve [the] material” (Cohen 298) of Shakespeare to make it more appropriate, i.e.

bowdlerize it. Carroll’s child-friends – children of acquaintances or even children he met by

chance and formed friendships with – included children from all walks of life, the Liddell

children being higher-class and better educated than some, but by no means out of the norm of

his social circle. In terms of his relationship to Alice herself, in his later article, “Alice on the

Stage” (1887), Carroll indeed described Alice with all the hyperbole of his contemporaries, the

romantic poets. According to Carroll, Alice was “with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes

only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but

names – empty words, signifying nothing!” (qtd. in Auerbach 32). Whether he was here referring

to Alice Liddell or the fictional Alice remains unclear, especially given that over twenty years

had passed since he wrote the book, and even more time had passed since he had been close with

the Liddells. What is clear in this quote is that, to some extent, Alice the character embodied an

idealization of childhood that, while wildly affectionate towards the child, somewhat diminished

the belief in the child’s capacity for emotion.

1.3 Context and Text in a State of Mutual Affectation

The final puzzle piece in looking at the context of Alice’s creation lies in looking beyond the

world of her creator and her content at the broader world surrounding childhood and family at

the time. In some ways, this context influenced Alice, in others, it influenced the reception of a

book like Alice. The intense shifts occurring politically and socially regarding childhood made

According to Cohen, Tennyson’s wife accused Carroll of ungentlemanlike behavior when he

received an unpublished copy of Tennysons’s poetry and asked permission to read and

disseminate it amongst his friends. This caused Carroll to become affronted and the two writers

became estranged (cf. Cohen 261).

space for a work as unheard of as Alice. Likewise, the fondness with which the Victorian era is

now remembered at least in the English-speaking world allows for a mutually affective

relationship between how Alice is perceived and how Victorian times are perceived to decide the

role the book takes in modernity. Thus, the question of what childhood and children’s literature

meant at the time arises in order to analyze the role this influence had both on how the text was

formed and on how it is now perceived.

The difficulty in analyzing the role of the child in Victorian England is twofold (at least).

Firstly, the Victorian period encompassed nearly a century, during which attitudes towards

childhood and child-rearing changed dramatically. Secondly, this period was marked by dramatic

differences along the lines of class stratification. Alice as a character is well-mannered, in the

process of being educated, and well-dressed, judging by Tenniel’s illustrations. She does not

behave or speak in a way a working class or even lower-middle-class child would: she has an

extensive vocabulary and keeps to a strict set of rules. She also exhibits a slightly spoiled,

petulant manner, which ultimately shows her to be accustomed to a standard of interaction

dictated by a codified set of rules. This indicates that she is at the very least from a wealthy

middle-class family. Moreover, in Nina Auerbach’s words, “Alice herself, prim and earnest in

pinafore and pumps, confronting a world out of control by looking for the rules and murmuring

her lessons, stands as one image of the Victorian middle-class child” (Auerbach 31) to a modern

reader.

Ginger Frost’s Victorian Childhoods shows that the notion of family at the time was

characterized by an idealization of the family featuring a “glorification of parental roles, for men

and for women” (Frost 3) and a strong emphasis on raising children. This is unsurprising, given

that “in 1841, 36.1 percent of the population was younger than fifteen” (Frost 3). According to

law, children came of age at 21. While the actual definition of the boundary between childhood

and adulthood was not as simple as the law suggested, this does show that a significant portion of

the population was composed of children by most definitions. Working class children began

working long before they came of age (though child labor laws were a topic of much debate and

were instituted towards the end of the Victorian era), while middle-class children would finish

school or occupational training in their mid to late teens, if, of course, they were male.

Additionally, “childhood lengthened during the course of the nineteenth century, too, so late

Victorian childhoods were different from early Victorian ones” (Frost 4). Alice, being

presumably middle or upper class and seven years old in a book published in 1865, would thus

have been deeply involved in schooling, which, as has already been established, forms an

important part of her characterization.

Frost focuses on the differences between Victorian childhoods based on class, gender, and

the progression of the concepts “family” and “childhood” throughout the 19

century. In terms

of the structure enabling family lives, she shows that in working class families, surroundings

were characterized in autobiographies of children growing up at the time as “tight spaces with

minimal privacy” (Frost 13) and minimal hygiene, leading to the fact that despite careful

attention to infants, child mortality was very high. In poor districts, “25 percent of children were

gone by five years old” (Frost 12). By contrast, middle and upper class people had not only the

space for a modicum of privacy and hygiene; they also had the “income and leisure to pursue

family lives as they pleased” (Frost 21). Additionally, they tended towards having fewer children

than the lower classes, given that the costs of educating an upper class child were significantly

higher. In all walks of life, strong bonds between siblings were encouraged, in the lower classes

frequently by virtue of older children becoming caretakers for younger children (cf. Frost 13)

and in the other classes simply as the most socially acceptable playmates.

Much of Frost’s emphasis rests on the role of the parents, citing 19

century politician

H.A.L. Fisher’s description of his mother’s life as “a perpetual surrender of ease and comfort to

the service of others” (qtd. in Frost 24) a fairly standard portrayal of mothers as domestic

goddesses. Fathers, on the other hand, were providers, “they were revered as the heads of the

households, and their needs came first” (Frost 24). Though she mentions the presence of nannies

as the main force in educating and raising small children in the middle and upper classes, Frost

emphasizes the bond between parents and children, focusing more on the reverence children

were expected to hold towards to their parents than vice versa. These traits are more elusive in

Alice, as Alice’s parents do not appear at all, nor are they mentioned. Alice’s sister is mentioned

in the opening and closing of the first book, but Alice doesn’t think or speak of her whilst in

Wonderland, a sign that in these books, the structure of Victorian society is being subverted

somehow.

Another major feature in child-rearing which is far more noticeable in Alice is the role of

discipline, which held a significantly different role in Victorian England than it does today. Frost

acknowledges that the punishments doled out by parents “border[…] on negligence to modern

eyes” (Frost 27), though at the time parents believed they were teaching the valuable skills of

piety, self-discipline and outward stoicism in the face of discomfort to their children. While

corporal punishment was a part of this, especially middle class parents preferred punishment

“through love and guilt rather than blows” (Frost 26), as well as using “religious training and

repentance to impress on children the need for virtue” (Frost 26). Essentially, Frost argues,

parents used a combination of personal filial indebtedness and religious piety to encourage

certain behaviors and discourage others, and these forms of discipline formed a large part of the

relationship towards children held for much of the 19

century. Alice certainly appears to have

taken these lessons to heart. The importance she gives proper behavior is one of the major

themes of the book, and her distress at being unable to act appropriately is perhaps the greatest

source of emotional difficulty for her within the text. While neither her parents nor any particular

religious affiliation are mentioned, a strong sense of crime and punishment are traceable

throughout the books, culminating in a trial to the death over stolen tarts in the final chapter of

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice views her own bad behavior as a punishable offense,

frequently chastising herself. When the trial begins, however, she is quick to understand the

punishment as disproportional to the crime and interrupts the proceedings. One interpretation of

this could be Alice’s rejection of unfair discipline, and thus a rejection of Victorian standards of

parenting.

In terms of education received in school, the 19

century saw the beginning of widespread,

available schooling and literacy, though “reforms began slowly” (Frost 37) even after working-

class men gained the right to vote and petitioned for literacy. Among the lower classes, education

was fairly rudimentary, while middle- and upper-class students might be in school from the age

of seven until the age of twenty (cf. Frost 45). Here, gender was the main difference. “Girls

learned first at home, so the quality of their early education depended on the skills and attention

of nurses, nannies, and mothers” (Frost 49), as well as the contents of the family library. Even

after childhood, girls only began attending similar boarding schools as their brothers did towards

the end of the Victorian period. Their education was focused more on learning

“accomplishments”, e.g. “piano playing and French” (Frost 50). The difference between the

sexes decided not only a child’s education, but also leisure time – “girls had toys and games that

fitted them for their future in domesticity, most obviously dolls” (Frost 80). Ultimately, girls’

education was geared towards securing a marriage as opposed to taking up a profession. Alice,

being school-age, is more explicitly preoccupied with lessons from the classroom, such as maths

and geography, but it is likely that if the protagonist were a little boy, there would be half as

much agony over insulting Wonderland creatures with improper etiquette.

In sum, Victorian childhood can be seen in several ways in Alice. The most obvious of these

is that the text itself interacts with the standards of education for young children, with which

Lewis Carroll, as a clergyman’s son and an eldest sibling himself, was intimately familiar. Alice

frequently recalls her lessons, but always incorrectly and without much enthusiasm; Wonderland

inhabitants seem to know the poetry she attempts to recite, and correct her. The proper manners

Alice believes herself to be enacting correctly are not up to the standards of admittedly bizarre

and themselves incredibly impolite denizens of Wonderland; nor are their mocking jabs at

Victorian etiquette received well by Alice. Additionally, while Alice has a sister, the two barely

interact, and only share dialogue in the first and last pages of the book; in the sequel, the sister is

replaced by Alice’s cat Dinah and her kittens (in some sense treated as dolls in that Alice

mothers them). Alice’s parents are not even mentioned. The absence of parental figures and

familial relationships undermine or even reject much of what Ginger Frost sets up as the central

features of Victorian family life; perhaps they also contribute to why Frost’s emphasis on the

parental figures is surprising to modern readers. On the other hand, one of the main features in

Alice is the sense of estrangement Alice’s surroundings give her. She is separated from her life of

domesticity, and estranged from the lessons of her Victorian socialization, and encounters only

unfriendly, authoritative adults whose interactions with her she experiences as unpleasant and

demanding. This alone makes the book something of a reaction to the educational and domestic

standards of the Victorian era.

Alice was by no means the only work of literature in Victorian times to interact with the

concept of childhood, and this cannot be discounted as another point of influence for the text.

Frost described Victorian attitudes towards the family as having a “lack of a child-centered

approach” (Frost 166). This is an interesting turn of phrase given that romantic poets of the time,

e.g. Wordsworth and Tennyson, the former writing in the early 19

century and the latter in the

mid-to late years of it, were known for their writing on the subject of children. They frequently

portrayed them as “innocent creatures who should be shielded from the adult world and allowed

to enjoy their childhood” (Gubar). Similarly, Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, published in 1898

at the end of the Victorian era showed the progression of this literary trope to the point where

two children under the care of the narrating governess are either innocents to be protected (as the

governess believes) or themselves already corrupted by adult influences. A combination of the

two is not a possibility presented by the narrator, nor is an innate lack of innocence or goodness

in the children believed to be possible. Partially, these literary attitudes could be linked to the

political movements towards prolonging childhood through mandatory education and “attempts

to regulate child labor” (Frost 75).

Being published in 1865, Alice entered a literary world characterized by innocent children in

books for adults and largely moralizing and religious sentiments in books for children. Alice

herself straddles the line, poking fun at both tropes, the innocent child who can do no wrong

unless an adult told her to, and the child that really ought to have learned her lessons. At the

same time Alice embraces aspects of both tropes – revealing also that Alice’s Adventures might

have been a book for a child but that did not necessarily make it a children’s book. In the very

first chapter, “Down the Rabbit-Hole”, Alice stumbles upon a bottle labeled “Drink me” and,

while relaying Alice’s internal debating whether or not it is in fact safe to drink, the following

lines reveal a very pointed reference to the state of children’s books at the time.

“No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not; for she had read

several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and

other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends

had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that,

if you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you,

sooner or later. (Carroll 17)

In this section, Alice herself does not mock the tropes and conventions of Victorian literature.

Far from it – she seems to take the “nice little stories” at face value. The narrator, however, does

not, using the turn of phrase “nice little stories” in reference to tales in which children die violent

deaths for not doing as they’re told makes the matter-of-fact presentation of the moral lessons

seem fairly sarcastic

. More than that, this passage also reveals that while the narrator is perhaps

a touch more dubious about actions and their consequences, relaying Alice’s thought process in a

semi-ironic tone, Alice herself views being “eaten up by wild animals” as perfectly just

retribution for not listening to good advice. In a way, Carroll’s writing here both satirizes the

heavy morality which was part and parcel of Victorian children’s literature and education, and

simultaneously reifies its solidity in the child’s mind, demonstrating the influence education

holds while critiquing the forms it took at the time. This tension between the image of Alice as

an integral part of a literary canon of little girls who “suggest […] the self-containment of

innocence and eternity” (Auerbach 31) while also revealing the innate brutality that was part of

The reference to “children who had got burnt” because they “would not remember the simple

rules their friends had taught them” may be an allusion to the Struwwelpeter (1845), a German

collection of stories by Heinrich Hoffman which was one of the earliest widely marketed (and

translated) picture books. It is comprised of a series of stories in which disobedient children die

fairly gruesomely after having been warned about their misbehavior and persisting in it

nonetheless.

their education and thus personalities becomes the central psychological conflict of the text

according to Nina Auerbach’s “Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child”.

Finally, the historical developments taking place between Carroll’s early life and his writing

of Alice’s Adventures in the early 1860s meant that the duration and concept of childhood had

perhaps already lengthened and shifted. Alice Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford don who

himself was descended from nobility, was from a wealthier background than Carroll; she had

fewer siblings and was the third-eldest, relieving her of many of the responsibilities of the older

siblings. She certainly received some form of education, as Carroll’s immediate function to the

Liddell children was as a tutor

, but as a girl, she neither attended boarding school nor had any

specific goals in her education beyond ultimately attracting a husband. She, unlike Carroll as a

child, had a significant amount of leisure time to spend on puzzles and games, as well as boat

rides on the Thames. This adds up to reveal that Alice, both in Wonderland and in the Liddell

family, had a very different childhood and indeed came from a different understanding of the

word “child” than Lewis Carroll did. In some ways, the child he was describing and the

definition of childhood she embodied might have been as foreign to Carroll as they are to a

modern reader, and thus equally fascinating to both.

Alice enters the world treading the uneasy ground as a book about children, for children, but

written by someone who had not been a child for a long time, had no children of his own, and

could have had a very different understanding of what childhood even meant than the child he

was writing for. Alice formed part of the basis for the budding genre of children’s literature, most

of which was encompassed by works treating the child subject with similar complexity. In an as-

He had met Henry Liddell, Alice’s father, in a professional context as they were both dons, and

the two had formed a friendship. Carroll expressed an interest in tutoring the Liddell children,

which Lorina, their mother, didn’t encourage. Carroll nonetheless persevered in tutoring them

when their parents left Oxford for a few weeks.

yet relatively undefined literary genre, it proved a lasting influence; prior to Carroll, works for

children were evaluated more in terms of functional value than as works of art. Jackie

Wullschläger, in her 1995 book Inventing Wonderland, examines the five Victorian and

Edwardian writers of children’s fantasy she views as having created the genre. She situates in the

nineteenth century “a growing sense […] of needs, desires, behavior and rights which were

distinctive to children” (Wullschläger 13), leading to enlarged empathy with children and

enabling the creation of the genre. At the very least, an enlarged empathy among adults was

created for what they viewed as childhood. James Kincaid’s Child Loving examines the manifold

comparisons in child-rearing manuals from the time of children to wax or other moldable

substances (cf. Kincaid 90), maintaining that children were to be both a mirror of the adults

raising them as well as a fundamental other; “If children were not bad, it would be impossible to

love them” (Kincaid 95). This means that children come with a manual of expected behaviors,

but that following that manual makes them inherently unchildlike; misbehavior is expected,

especially of boys, because the adult-child relationship depends on the schema of misbehavior

being followed by punishment and good behavior being followed by reward. Childhood,

according to Kincaid, is expected to be a process of shaping an adult product and if the process is

not visible or enacted, if the child does not require shaping, the adult’s role vanishes, leaving the

an unloveable and unraiseable child. In a way, it seems Carroll realizes this – Alice tries so hard

to fulfill every standard of behavior she has been taught, and all it does is alienate her further

from the adults she encounters. Carroll and his creations emerged, in the end, from a very

contradictory period in terms of the role of the child, in which childhood was highly valued but

ultimately highly performative, more interested in adults reactions to children than the children

themselves, and of these, only well-behave, clean, healthy, rich children. Alice herself often

showcases this, with her consistent desire to please whomever she encounters in Wonderland and

frequent frustration at her own inability to recite the correct poems or use the correct mannerisms

to do so.

Alice’s origins are a central part of how she is perceived today. Nostalgia for and interest in

previous times forms a significant part of popular culture, leading in part to the plethora of

adapted material. Alice takes a special role in this, as the Alice books emerged simultaneously

with the beginnings of the current understanding of childhood as well as the legal ramifications

which surround it. Alice, both as a character and as a real child, becomes the epitome of the

Victorian child, in part due to her iconic nature and in part due to her struggles to actually be a

child. As one of the benchmarks of children’s literature, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and

Through the Looking Glass are one of the earliest parts of this particular canon, and as such

contributed in no small way to the parameters and contents of future children’s literature. As

such, they frequently take on a nostalgic role in people’s lives – they remind not only of

historicity and Victoriana, but also evoke personal childhood memories in an adult readership,

both scholarly and otherwise. In a way, the term “Victorian childhood” comes to stand for a set

of assumptions which might not have a bearing on reality, and readers of Alice expect to find

these within the text. This shrouds the books in an almost folkloric light, connecting a deeply

personal literary experience with an understanding of history and the cultural concept of

childhood. It is no wonder that the many layers of meaning Alice is entangled in become a site

for adaptation – the personal value the books hold to readers in contrast to the concreteness of

their origins seem to inspire a desire to make them timeless by forming them into a mold relevant

to the adapter’s time over and over again. The act of adaptation enables the reclaiming or

refuting of a lost time and a lost childhood, neither of which are real in any place but the reader’s

mind – not that this in any way makes them less valuable. In order to further examine what about

Alice enables this complex relationship of adaptation, personal significance and historical

relevance, in chapter two I will be focusing on the mythologizing of the books’ origin story and

how this influenced the ease and frequency with which it has been adapted.

2. “I Must Have Changed Several Times Since Then”

2.1 “All in the Golden Afternoon”

Alice’s origin lies in the story of the first time Carroll told Alice to Alice Liddell,

informing the folktale aura surrounding not only the text but also subsequent adaptations and

retellings. In the poem prefacing the book, Carroll refers to the “golden afternoon” on the

Thames during which he told the story to the three eldest Liddell sisters, Lorina, Alice and Edith

(Carroll 7). This turn of phrase, intentionally or not, “dominates almost all contemporary

accounts of Alice’s origins” (Brooker 11). The date of the memorable afternoon, July 4

1862, is

verified, both in Carroll’s diary as well as in the account of Reverend Duckworth, who was the

final member of the party of the rowing expedition during which the story was told (Gardner 7f.).

According to Duckworth’s account, Carroll said, “I’m inventing as we go along” (qtd. in

Gardner 9), thus providing a basis for the story’s putative spontaneity and ingenuity. Carroll

himself describes Alice as something akin to fairy tales. Twenty-five years after the first

publication of Alice, Carroll writes that he invented the rabbit-hole story that afternoon “in a

desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore” with “the cloudless blue above, the

watery mirror below” (qtd. in Gardner 8). Pointedly, Carroll does not claim that the entire story

was told that afternoon; as we have already seen, the tale underwent heavy editing between its

first edition as Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and its second as Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland. Many of the most iconic sequences were later additions. In fact, it is only Alice

Hargreaves’ statement, quoted by her son Caryl seventy years later which posits that “nearly all

of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground was told that blazing summer afternoon” (Brooker 15). The

Alice to the Caterpillar, explaining she might have known who she was this morning, but she

does not anymore (Carroll 49)

The first line of the prefatory poem to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll 7)

adult Alice’s claim was made after Carroll had passed away. Hargreaves herself was at this point

an octogenarian recalling events from her early adolescence.

Meteorological reports from the day and time (July 4

, 1862) as well as Carroll’s

personal diaries, in which he kept record of the weather, note that the day was most likely not at

all golden, but rather grey and overcast (cf. Gardner 9). This being known by most scholars who

work on the subject has in no way impeded the popularity of the myth; Martin Gardner, in his

annotations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, begins his paragraph on the subject of the poor

weather with “it is with sadness that I add” (Gardner 9), indicating a preference even by a scholar

for the image of the golden afternoon. In a certain sense, it doesn’t matter whether or not the

story was conceived spontaneously during a sunny or a cloudy boat ride on the Thames because

the image of that origin is now so deeply ingrained in the story. Why else would Morton Cohen,

as the first biographer to have full access to Carroll’s diaries and to realize several pages had

been cut out, begin his chapter on the Alice books by saying “it happened on that “golden

afternoon”” (Cohen 123) despite knowing (and stating later on) that the afternoon was not golden

and the story did not emerge in its entirety as we know it for a further three years? The word

“golden” has been taken in the meteorological sense especially after Alice Liddell calling it a

“blazing hot afternoon”, but also in the metaphorical sense of the pastoral idyll it paints.

“Golden” becomes in some sense a stand-in for untroubled and joyful memory, a shiny,

untarnished, pure time.

The idea of the book’s inception as an orally improvised tale with no further labor than

the spark of Carroll’s genius and the presence of Alice Liddell as his muse gives Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland at least a hint of the natural, the unstudied and the uncrafted. The

status of the first, hand-written draft of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, illustrated and bound

by Carroll himself and given to Alice Liddell for Christmas, provides a sense of the personal and

intimate about the volume. The “authentic” first edition of Alice serves also as a point of origin

for readers and fans of Carroll’s invention. In as much as the books form a distinct break with

didacticism in children’s literature as well as serving, according to Helen Pilinovski’s essay

“Body as Wonderland”, “the fledgling genre of fantasy well” (Pilinovsky 178), the personal

dedication to a specific child lends the book much of its distinct flavor in popular culture.

“Authenticity” is a fraught word, especially when surrounded by words such as “folktale”

and “origin”

, but when one of the main interests in a book is unmediated access to a child

audience, believing that the child in question is not only a chimerical universal child but could in

fact be one specific real child focuses a collective nostalgia for childhood and origins on this one

story. Especially in the post-film industry world, in which a certain mistrust towards movies and

books as consumer products is taken for granted, a perhaps naïve view of the Victorian Era as

one of innocence (or at least repression) and the Alice books as personal and heartfelt rather than

mass-marketed is comforting.

While this is a very important factor, it is not only the notion of the book as emerging

from a spontaneous, emotionally laden place that gives it a connection to narrative as rooted in

the spoken form, connecting the personal encounter the story emerged from to the more

community-oriented idea of folk and fairy tales. It is also ingrained in the style of the books

themselves. Although Cohen’s biography of Carroll states that “above all, these books have no

moral” (Cohen 142), he contradicts himself on a number of levels here. Largely, this is due to the

In Jack Zipes’ Breaking the Magic Spell, he traces the origins of folktale themes from “Homer

and the Greek dramatists” (Zipes 7) onwards. Additionally, he shows that many compilers of

folktale collections, e.g. Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, were

working with similar source material, making the national claims to the individuality and

authenticity of their folktale canon very difficult to verify to say the least.

fact that he doesn’t establish what he means by “moral”. If he means that Alice’s Adventures

didn’t conclude with a didactic lesson on behavior, this is certainly accurate. If he means that the

story doesn’t come to a particularly satisfying conclusion wrapping up all of the confusing

threads of the book and stating a general theme, as is often the case with modern novels, a case

could be made for that

. If, however, Cohen means to say that nothing on the subject of self-

betterment can be learned from the Alice books, he certainly contradicts himself. Prior to this,

Cohen conducted a reading of the books as a coming of age narrative in which Alice ”succeeds,

but not through the formula of grand romance. Instead of honeyed happiness, she gains

confidence” (Cohen 139). Cohen finds “meaning” in a way not dissimilar to didactic literature.

The reading of Alice’s Adventures as a coming of age story is by no means uncommon;

particularly the sequence of events in Through the Looking-Glass which lead to Alice being

crowned as queen on the chessboard lends itself to this interpretation.

The folktale connotation provided by the oral origin of Alice and Carroll’s own statement

calling it “fairy-lore” provide an odd juxtaposition with the intense rejection of moral teaching in

the Alice books. This latter interpretation was the one Carroll himself favored, saying in the

same letter in which he advised a child to not read a book containing a moral that because of the

moral, the book was clearly “not by Lewis Carroll” (Letters to Child-Friends 34). Carroll’s

rejection of portraying his book as a learning experience points towards his break with the tropes

of children’s literature and the more heavy-handed aspects of child-rearing a the time. It also

breaks from the trope in fairy tales of providing a clear moral (for instance, the Brothers Grimm

tales often ending in rhyming couplets stating said moral). The presence of an undercurrent of

Alice’s Adventures ends with Alice waking up and realizing it was all a dream, telling her

sister about it and then running off. The final paragraph consists of the sister picturing Alice as

“a grown woman” (Carroll 132) telling her own children about Wonderland.

self-actualization and journey towards adulthood that can be read as a possible subtext of the

Alice books is nonetheless reminiscent of certain tropes of fairy tales, though more frequently

ones with male protagonists. The contradictory nature of both Carroll’s own view of his writing

and Cohen’s interpretation of it seems to flounder a little at the cross-section between the joy in

writing nonsense and creating a book meant for pleasure and the apparently diametrically

opposed notion of writing for the sake of edification. This could be counted as a byproduct of

Victorian education being significantly more draconian and less entertaining than schooling

nowadays; it could also simply be an author not entirely prepared for the depth of speculation

aimed at his work intended only to amuse one single child. It could also be that at the time, it

seemed impossible for a children’s book to be both enjoyable and educational. Equally, what

now may seem as a moral – the importance of independence as seen by Alice’s rejection of the

house of cards – may have then, in a time of far more explicit morals at the end of texts, been too

subtle to count as such.

The language of Alice is worth considering in this regard as it is the site for Cohen’s

interpretation of the books as a learning artifact. Cohen again brings in the concept of edification

here, saying that the narrator of the books “uses big, polysyllabic words, sophisticated concepts,

notions that a child cannot possibly be expected to grasp” (Cohen 142) but noting that the

episodic structure of adventures is easy to follow and thus the true intention of the book is to

educate in vocabulary and word games. This is certainly easily believed of Carroll, a tutor for

many of his child-friends, whom he often introduced himself to by way of puzzles he had made

himself (cf. Cohen 174). In conjunction with Alice’s struggles to achieve adequate social

behavior, the text could even be read as a children’s codebook for social behaviour. In his

chapter “Aspects of Alice”, Michael Hancher notes that perhaps Alice was never intended for

children to read alone for this precise reason; “having an adult mediate the story for a child can

resolve some aspects of the “readability” problem” (Hancher 200). Hancher also notes that the

narrator himself often serves this purpose, offering “helpful comments” (Hancher 201) and

glossing some of the more difficult words. However, being unresponsive to individual questions,

he is not as helpful as “an adult reader-aloud who impersonates the narrator” (Hancher 201), thus

not only bringing the story alive but, in fact, recalling Carroll’s “first telling of the story”

(Hancher 201). This brings the sequence of viewing the text as an oral artifact full circle, when

the act of reading it aloud is seen as in a way more authentic to its origin than regarding it as

simply text on a page.

2.2 “Some New Line of Fairy-Lore”

As we have seen, Alice’s relation to fairy tales is explicitly linked to a myth of origin.

The notion of an oral story, one that changed significantly between telling and retelling as Alice’s

Adventures Underground, and then changed again before becoming Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland, gives Alice a malleability, an innately transitive nature, that few works of literature

possess. In addition, it fulfills a number of tropes of fairy tales; Carroll, as well as outright

calling the book “some new line of fairy-lore” (qtd. in Gardner 8) admitted that he did not

entirely know if he could classify Alice as an original work, though he claims he was “no

conscious imitator in writing it” (qtd. In Sigler xviii). He says this against the backdrop of an

enormous influx of Alice-related material published after his books, which “alternately angered

and flattered” (Sigler xvii) him, well aware of both the influx of material he inspired and aware

of some accusations he himself was borrowing from previous “literary fairy tales” (Sigler xvii).

The temptation exists today to blame this interesting connection on the 1951 Disney movie,

Carroll about the creation of Alice in the article “Alice on the Stage” (qtd. in Gardner 8)

released during the original Disney heyday of animated musicals based on Grimm’s Kinder- und

Hausmärchen, easily confusing Alice as one of them. However, even beyond Carroll’s own

connection of the books to “fairy lore”, one of the first reviews of the book, published in the

Guardian in 1865, said of Alice that “a more original fairy tale […] it has not lately been our

good fortune to read” (qtd. in Cohen 131). Given that Grimm’s fairy tales had been released

nearly half a century earlier, the connection could and indeed was made at this time already

In ethnographic writing on the subject of folklore, the definitions of what exactly

comprises a folk or fairy tale are difficult to pin down. The word folklore itself originates from

the German Volkskunde, used first by the Brothers Grimm and then introduced in the English

language in 1846 by “an English antiquary, William John Thoms” (Dorson 1) as a replacement

for “popular antiquities” (Dorson 1). The transition away from “antiquities”, which implies a

fossilized, unchangeable nature to folklore, emerges from the time of the beginnings of

nationalism and a resurgence of medieval fairy tales for the modern bourgeoisie. This was

pioneered in Germany by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, and over the course of the following

century, folklore became a mutable cultural good which even had its own artistic merit beyond

enjoyment for the masses.

In Richard Dorson’s introduction to Folklore and Folklife, he describes the major subsets

of folklore after his notes on the origins and common usage of the term

. Of these, the closest

Which type of fairy tale is reflected in Alice is another question, however - where the fantastic

in Grimm’s fairy tales appears largely in the form of inheritance, i.e. a gift given by a parent or

elder, or curses and blessings by witches and good fairies, respectively, in Celtic mythology

frequently a child or young adult is kidnapped into a fairy realm which is as beautiful as it is

dangerous. The hero is often threatened by being forced to stay there by his own actions. This

type of fairy tale has arguably more in common with Alice than most of the stories in the

Grimms’ collection.

“To the layman, and to the academic man too, folklore suggests falsity, wrongness, fantasy,

and distortion. Or it may conjure up pictures of granny women spinning traditional tales in

relation to the folktale is the subdivision “folk narrative, which in turn has its own manifold

distinctions” (Dorson 2). Dorson speaks largely of folk narrative as an authorless, oral tradition,

which can take any literary form and also “frequently does enter into written literature” (Dorson

2). In terms of the use of folklore around the early to mid 19

century, the time just prior to

Carroll’s writing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “scholars in one country of Europe after

another searched for the soul of the people revealed in the native dialects, the folktales and

folksongs carried in those dialects, the literature developing the themes of the folklore” (Dorson

20). Following the French Revolution in the late 18

century and the development of the nation

as a concept based on a communal identity, folklore became a way of historicizing these alleged

markers of nationality and creating a literal book of national values. The fact that many of these

national treasures appeared cross-culturally, i.e. variations of the same tale in multiple allegedly

national collections, seemed to matter little to the projects as a whole.

In Linda Dégh’s chapter Folk Narrative, she quotes Jakob Grimm’s statement “das

Märchen is poetischer, die Sage historischer” (Deutsche Sagen, 1816. Qtd. in Dégh 59). This

roughly translates to, “the fairy tale is more poetic, the legend historical”, and these definitions

have proved somewhat lasting. Dégh then proceeds to describe a series of tropes that typologize

the fairy tale, i.e. the framing through standard openings and endings such as “once upon a time”

(cf Dégh 60). To Dégh, the plot of the fairy tale features “an ordinary human being’s encounter

with the suprahuman world and his becoming endowed with qualities that enable him to perform

supernatural acts” (Dégh 63). The fairy tale then becomes a sort of escapist fantasy in which the

difficulties of the hero’s real life are subordinated to the new supernatural difficulties, and once

mountain cabins or gaily costumed peasants performing seasonal dances. In the present work,

folklore will mean both a field of learning and the whole subject matter of that field” (Dorson

1f.)

the latter are conquered the former cease to exist. To a certain extent, this can be applied to Alice,

at least the hero’s supernatural journey in which the rules of the real world do not apply.

The overarching plot of the fairy tale does not entirely apply to the book, given that Alice

does not begin the story with anything to overcome and doesn’t really have much by way of

stakes or character development. At least, this can be said of the original Alice – the Alices of the

century and onwards fulfill the hero’s journey criteria for a fairy tale far better. In film

adaptations, the chapter-by-chapter episodic nature of the story is replaced by some sort of goal

for Alice herself, at least, if not for the other characters or Wonderland as a whole. Thus it could

be said that while perhaps Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does not stand on its own as a fairy

tale, popular conception of it as one due to a few common elements has led to adaptation pushing

it further and further into the narrative niche of fairy tales.

Another of Dégh’s criteria for the fairy tale which is far easier to spot in Alice is the use

of “the right formulas” (Dégh 61) to achieve the hero’s goals. Alice is something of a subversion

of this trope; she consistently misuses the formulas or cannot discover the correct ones. At the

end of Wonderland, she grows frustrated and accuses the Queen of Hearts’ court of being

“nothing but a pack of cards” (Carroll 129) rather than attempt to comply with their court and by

extension formulas. This is as close to a moment of self-actualization as Wonderland comes,

closing Alice’s hero’s journey in most adaptations. In Kincaid’s analysis, this is Alice gaining

“power to resist play” (Kincaid 290); a power she really had all along, namely to always decline

invitation and play by the strict rules of her upbringing, i.e. to be a child who always behaves.

This he had previously described as an “impossible [child] to love” (Kincaid 95). Perhaps this

somewhat unsatisfactory coming-of-age moment is so odd and out-of-place simply because Alice

has become a prim, female Peter Pan – unable to grow up for fear of ruining the magic. Perhaps,

on the other hand, the reader is always slightly against Alice and her proper ways, rooting instead

for the chaotic and ultimately more interesting Wonderland. At any rate, the themes align with a

fairy tale ending, though reception makes it seem like a subversion. Alice as a character stands

out from fairy tale characters, however, as being ultimately rewarded for misusing the formulas

as opposed to punished.

Jack Zipes, primarily a Grimm scholar, concurs with the term “fairy tale” as more of an

art than its antecedent the folk tale

. On the topic of the flood of folk-tale collection in the early

1800s, Zipes says that the collecting “was usually done by trained professionals who often

stylized the tales, changed them, or were highly selective” (Zipes 15). This indicates on Zipes’

part a certain presentation of the written fairy tales as inferior to their oral origins; he goes on to

claim that “the contents and structure of these saccharine tales upheld the Victorian values of the

status quo” (Zipes 15). The use of the word “saccharine” especially indicates that despite Zipes’

focus being on precisely the practices that led to the wide dissemination of fairy tales, he

maintains a certain disdain for their inauthenticity. He alleviates this tension by focusing on the

change in type of fairy tale: “Though the term Volksmärchen was retained, the nineteenth

century saw the creation of the Kunstmärchen and the relegation of the Volksmärchen to the

lower classes and the domain of the household and children” (Zipes 26)

. Zipes differentiates

fairy tales along not only historical lines but also by class lines, indicating that the Victorian era

saw a rise in fairy tales created by and intended for the growing middle class. This is certainly

applicable to Alice as a fairy tale; as shown previously, both the character Alice as well as

While Zipes establishes something of a difference between the two terms at the beginning of

Breaking the Magic Spell, he proceeds to use the terms somewhat interchangeably for the rest of

the book, making his notes on the subject of the difference between the two terms confusing.

“Volksmärchen” could be translated as “folk fairy tale”, while “Kunstmärchen” would be “art

fairy tale”.

Carroll himself were upper-middle-class and middle-class, respectively, and many of the

struggles of the book are middle-class preoccupations, while some of the fantastical elements and

themes hearken back to folk tale motifs. Thus, Alice, containing thematical elements related to

fairy tales as well as the social markers of a Kunstmärchen, is drawn into the genre of fairy tale

by virtue of association though the time it was published, a few striking commonalities, and most

importantly, its origin.

What these definitions hint at is the aura of communal property surrounding folktale as a

concept; folktales are authorless, belonging to both everyone who has heard or told them, and

simultaneously no one in particular. With an author who has become almost as strong a presence

as the book itself, this feat would seem almost unimaginable for Alice. However, adaptation of

Alice, despite Carroll’s fairly clear statements on whether or not this was a book that ought to be

analyzed, has over time created more and more layers of distance from the original work, to the

point of disassociating Carroll from the role of authorship and instead relegated him to becoming

almost a further fictional character, whose life story must be told in a way that allows for the

reading of his books that is presented either academically or in film to be acceptable. According

to Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author”, in modernity, “the prestige of the

individual” (Barthes 143) demands the presence of an author figure. Barthes criticizes this by

pointing out that the author then serves as a decoder ring of sorts for the entire text, which serves

only “to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified” (Barthes 147), subsuming

the author into the text. Carroll’s biography certainly has often been used as a catch-all method

for explaining Alice in some ways, and is more and more assimilated into the text.

Morton Cohen calls the books “a record of Charles [Dodgson]’s childhood” (Cohen 139);

meanwhile Brooker cites an early edition of the Annotated Alice in which Martin Gardner

commented that it could be said “that Carroll found an outlet for his repressions in the

unrestrained, whimsically violent visions of his Alice books” (qtd. in Brooker 95). From the math

games spotted by those in the know about Carroll’s career as a mathematician to the rumors of

pedophilia to the post-1960s connection frequently made between Alice and LSD or, as a more

Victorian alternative, opium, following Jefferson Airplane’s “drug anthem” (Brooker 81) “White

Rabbit”, any variety of aspects from Carroll’s biography have become leading methods of

explaining the books. Whether or not any of these things were actually a part of Carroll’s life has

become less and less relevant

. Instead, Carroll’s life is rewritten to create the book the writer

wants Alice to be, and to furnish their reading of Alice with an understandable logic. In doing so,

they speak directly to the question of genre Alice evokes: it is not a fairy tale in so much as it was

written by one man and published for his profit as a novel – it belonged solely to him for a

number of years before entering the public domain. Thus it did not enter into being as communal

property, and yet it is understood as such in a way, and in order to make this contradiction easier

to parse, Carroll too is public property.

Perhaps this slow weaning of the interpretation from objective reality confirms Barthes’

projected future of literary criticism. To Barthes, “the reader is the space on which all the

quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies

not in its origin but in its destination” (Barthes 148). To some extent, then, the sum of parts a

reader has received in reference to Alice is an individual experience dictated only by their own

reactions; to some extent, Alice is lifted free of the reality of Carroll’s life and placed in the

reader’s fictional imagination of the same. In this estimation, it does not matter whether Alice

was intended to be a fairy tale or an entirely new type of writing, or that large parts of the text do

As far as all the sources I have consulted are concerned, there was absolutely no connection

between Carroll and drug use.

not necessarily fit that definition – it only matters that Alice is understood as such in the readers’

minds and thus adapted to reflect a more fairy-tale-like aesthetic.

Understanding Alice as a text which has come to function as fairy tale within popular

culture, though not necessarily by intention, “some new type of fairy-lore” being interpretable as

an intention for diversion from the genre, explains many facets of the current understanding of

the text. Both the fixation on the “golden afternoon” of its origins and on Alice as a spontaneous

oral product fit within the notion of how fairy tales are created and conveyed. Understanding

Alice as a fairy tale also gives it more of an archetypal quality, more of the weight fairy tales

hold as national urtexts, explaining at least in part how Alice could come to hold such a

signifying power of modern understanding of the Victorian period. This could also be one of the

contributing factors to the transition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the

Looking-Glass to being known as Alice in Wonderland, eliminating Through the Looking-Glass

from the title the works are known by. The melding associates them centrally with the first book,

and by extension, with the origin of the first book. Alice becomes real in Alice Liddell and at the

same time elevated to a timelessly folkloric status; even more, the act of telling the Alice story as

opposed to reading it becomes the right way to tell it, becomes almost traditional. Individuality

in interpretation and style of presenting the material is part of its essence. With the rise of new

forms of media, interpretation of Alice in film and alternative media became possible.

Illustration of Alice formed such a central part of the text, and was the most accessible part to

child readers, that for readers the images were equal to the text in terms of generating nostalgic

value.

3. “What is the Use of a Book Without Pictures?”

3.1 Knowing by Seeing: Illustration as an Epistemological Tool

“What is the use of a book without pictures?” (Carroll 11) Alice asks, while watching her

sister read, before she falls asleep and before she enters Wonderland. The answer, to her,

apparently is none, and it is lucky that the book Alice herself is in has pictures aplenty. When

thinking about Alice as a character, perhaps the first image that comes to mind is a little girl,

sometimes blond, sometimes brunette, sometimes in a blue dress, and sometimes not. For some,

she appears as an illustration from the books and for others as a character in a film. The

association between Alice and image is very strong, and very easily called to mind, but it also

diverse and has existed in many ways. Peter Pan, which was not originally illustrated, has by

contrast appeared fairly uniformly on stage and on the screen over the years. Alice’s image, and

the images of other characters appearing in the books, have appeared so frequently over the

years, and in so many guises, that the only point of agreement appears to be that they must

appear as images.

In the previous chapters, I have discussed how the context in which Alice was created

affected the text as well as how current views of that time have affected interpretations and

adaptations of Alice, and how the act of retelling it purports to be more authentic to its origins

than rereading it. This lays the groundwork for written retellings, but in fact the majority of

retellings that are currently well-remembered are films. This is by no means surprising – as

already mentioned, Alice was one of the earliest children’s books to have a strong interplay

between image and text. Carroll himself was an avid photographer (he was moderately well-

known for his photography at the time, as the technology was very new and not many had the

Alice expressing dissatisfaction with her sister’s book (Carroll 11)

means or the skills). He illustrated Alice’s Adventures Underground, the edition he gave directly

to Alice Liddell. When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published by Macmillan three

years later, they hired John Tenniel as a professional illustrator. Carroll worked closely with

Tenniel and didn’t allow him to veer far from the designs in Alice’s Adventures Underground.

The images provided by both Carroll and Tenniel have allowed Alice to wander far from the

confines of a book. After Tenniel’s illustration, the most influential image of Alice appears in

Disney’s 1951 film Alice in Wonderland. The conjunction of Tenniel’s images, the lasting

controversies sparked by Carroll’s photography, and Disney’s film form striking impressions of

Alice as image that have lasted until today and informed all later adaptations. In fact, these three

sources form three major points of origin for Alice’s representation in image, and depending on

which impression is the strongest with the adapter, guide the way Alice is understood.

The interplay between text and image in Alice is far more intricate than in most Victorian

works. While the picture book as a form of narrative for children was not entirely unheard of in

1865, when Alice was published, it was at its beginnings and significantly more rare than it is

today. In the original edition given to Alice Liddell, Carroll illustrated the book himself; after

signing a contract with MacMillan, John Tenniel, an already famous artist for newspapers and

political satire at the time, was recommended to Carroll (cf. Cohen 127). Tenniel and Carroll

appear to have clashed on a number of matters (cf. Cohen 129), though not severely enough to

halt the production of the book. Carroll’s standards for the illustration were very specific, largely

following his original illustrations in the book he gave Alice Liddell. Tenniel, as an established

artist, did not take some of Carroll’s suggestions, such as that he use a model for his illustrations

of Alice (cf. Gardner 11). Nonetheless, both author and illustrator appear to have been satisfied

with the final product, and either way, the illustrations have had at least as much of an influence

on how Alice is remembered as the text has.

According to Mou-Lan Wong’s essay “Generations of Re-Generation”, this interplay of

text and visual forms a part of Alice’s lasting appeal. In her discussion of the text, the role of

image within it is that it “plays on what Alice “sees” and what she “reads”” (Wong 142).

Tenniel’s illustrations, then, become a method of immersion into the world of the text,

corresponding closely with it. This is even more pronounced in Through the Looking Glass,

where “the whole of chapter 11 comprises a title and one fragment of a sentence that

accompanies the illustration it faces. Here the text is reduced to the status of caption, a subtext,

and Tenniel’s drawings are “elevated to primary status” (Wong 148). Wong is referring to the

chapter in which Alice awakes from her dream about the Looking-Glass world and realizes she is

not shaking the Red Queen between her hands but instead a black kitten. This information is split

between two chapters, both shorter than a page. At the end of chapter nine, Alice threatens the

red queen, “I’ll shake you into a kitten” (Carroll 280), and she does so in chapter ten, entitled

“shaking” (Carroll 281)

. This is followed immediately by chapter eleven, “waking” (Carroll

282), in which the only sentence is “it really was a kitten after all” (Carroll 282)

. Both chapters

feature illustrations of Alice’s hands holding first the red queen and then the kitten she turns out

to be when Alice wakes up. Splitting the moment of waking between two chapters and using the

same image with different subjects recreates both the disorientation of waking from a dream by

separating the visual moment of realization from the textual one, as well as indicating that both

text and images are valid sources of understanding; nowhere in the actual text is it clearly stated

in these chapters that Alice is waking up from a dream, except in the chapter titles. Focusing on

See Appendix A, fig. 5

See Appendix A, fig. 6

the intense interplay between text and image in Alice and showing that image occasionally

overshadows text as a way of knowing what is happening in the story shows that to some degree,

Alice has always been a visual medium. This allows for an easier understanding of Alice as film

material for later interpreters.

Alice waking up from her dream is only revealed in full at the beginning of chapter

twelve, but it can be guessed by the illustration and headings, possibly the only two features a

child reader who cannot yet read would really perceive without adult help. Additionally, the

image provided shows only Alice’s hands holding the kitten, framing the page, thereby

positioning the reader’s hands in the same place as Alice’s. According to Wong, this not only

“foregrounds the cooperation of the reader’s body and the physical artifact of the book” (Wong

149), but is also a form of tribute to the artist’s hands, in this case both Tenniel and Carroll. The

reader is placed in the position of both Alice and Alice’s creators, meaning that in some way, the

creators become part of the fiction, and the fiction becomes part of the reader. Alice, Carroll and

Tenniel now exist both as presences in and manipulators of narrative and image, and the reader

accesses them both from the same point of view. Especially child readers who have only this

access to the narrative could easily form strong bonds with the visual that have little or no

relationship to the actual textual content.

Image can thus define characters in perception, and be one mode of explaining why

interpretation of a character may be divergent from textual description but still recognizably the

same character. The prime example for this is Alice herself. Within the two books Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the figure of Alice is the most

frequently repeated one, and, in adaptation, often carries over many of her characteristics – the

dress with the wide skirt and apron, as well as the length and shape of her hair and headband.

Auerbach argues that “the demure propriety” (Auerbach 35) of Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice

have “led readers to see her role in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as more passive than it is”

(Auerbach 35). By contrast, the photograph of Alice Liddell Carroll appended to Alice’s

Adventures under Ground was “strikingly sensuous and otherworldly” (Auerbach 34), and

Carroll’s original illustrations “reproduce her eeriness perfectly” (Auerbach 34). This effect is

produced by the changeable colors of her hair, at times blonde and at times brunette, though

never straight and with bangs as Alice Liddell’s was. Auerbach, unlike most scholars, does not

attribute this to Carroll’s lack of artistic skill, but rather to a desire to portray Alice herself as

equally changeable, eerie and mildly threatening as her surroundings in Wonderland. Tenniel,

meanwhile, was criticized by Carroll as being the “only artist, who has drawn for me, who has

resolutely refused to use a model” (qtd. in Gardner 11) which led to a number of pictures in Alice

being “entirely out of proportion – head decidedly too large and feet decidedly too small” (qtd. in

Gardner 11). Auerbach calls Tenniel’s drawings of Alice “clean” and “no-nonsense” (Auerbach

35), eliminating in the illustrations the kinship between Alice and Wonderland. This in turn

affects the way Alice is read in the text, becoming more no-nonsense herself and hiding her role,

in Auerbach’s argument at least, as the creator of Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world.

Tenniel’s original illustrations were without color and the only colored ones he provided

were for the Nursery Alice, released some years later. In these, her dress is yellow or orange, but

this color scheme is seen fairly seldom in adaptation. One of the few better-known adaptations to

keep this coloring nowadays is Nick Willing’s 1999 Alice in Wonderland. Instead, most

frequently, Alice is portrayed in a blue dress. The blue dress is commonly believed to have

originated in Walt Disney’s 1951 film Alice in Wonderland. In fact, the blue dress has been an

iconic feature in illustrations of the book in color since 1893, in an American edition published

by Thomas Crowell, and has since then appeared in many new editions of the books that chose to

use different illustrations or color Tenniel’s. In the Disney version, while the general outline of

the characters and images are similar, these are heavily simplified and transformed to fit

Disney’s more comedic, cartoonish style; as such, the level of detail on Alice’s dress is

exchanged for a simple blue dress with a white apron in roughly the same shape as Tenniel drew

them, and the girl herself appears to be a cross between Tenniel’s Alice and Kathryn Beaumont,

the voice actress and model on which the illustrations of Alice were based. It is this blue dress

(be it Disney’s or those predating Disney’s) which became the iconic image of Alice, repeated in

most movie adaptations – especially ones affiliated with Disney, which quite a few of the

currently more well-known ones are, e.g. Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland, or the TV

series Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. Even American McGee’s 2000 computer game

shows Alice in a blue dress, albeit as a young adult and with some modifications to the costume.

Alice’s appearance over the years remains true to these original themes, though the shape of

characters surrounding her and the understanding of her story differ wildly – in fact, the closest

tie maintained to the urtext is Alice’s figure clad in Alice’s dress. The maintenance of image is

registered as a way to maintain content as well.

Another key character whose illustration by Tenniel has become synonymous with his

portrayal in adaptation is the Mad Hatter

. This is a particularly interesting case, as the Mad

Hatter often receives expansion as a character in adaptations, appearing more frequently and with

greater relevance to the plot than he does in the book (arguably because adaptations, unlike the

See Appendix C2, a computer game in which Alice has gone insane and must fight a variety of

Wonderland characters to regain sanity.

Carroll is not responsible for the turn of phrase “mad as a hatter” – the phrase was a common

one in Britain prior to the Alice books and Carroll was presumably using a literal image of the

somewhat baffling colloquialism (cf. Ryan)

original books, actually have plots). The Mad Hatter in particular stands out, however – Tenniel

illustrated him six times, five times in Wonderland and once in Through the Looking-Glass,

where the illustration remains the same but the character is referred to as “Hatta” or “the King’s

Messenger” (Carroll 206). He is the only character to receive this semblance of continuity

between books, excluding Alice and Dinah, her cat. This makes the illustration of the Hatter the

primary reason to believe the Looking-Glass world and Wonderland are the same place, which is

stated nowhere in the text, though the two books are often conflated in adaptation. Again,

illustration is thereby promoted to being a valid epistemological tool for the world of the text.

The Hatter has a diminutive stature and caricature-like proportions. While he is roughly

the same height as Alice, who is seven, his head is enormous. It, as well as his large, for-sale hat

have been adapted faithfully with great regularity. Particularly these comedic large features lend

themselves well to Disney’s animation style. While some live-action versions, especially Alice

(2009) and Once Upon A Time In Wonderland feature the Mad Hatter not only as a real person

but as a love interest, the hat and slight shabbiness of his clothing are maintained, indicating a

working-class character. Again, the text does not state he is working class, or that his clothes are

in any way in disrepair, but he is consistently adapted as such, the image once again overriding

the text.

Perhaps even more important than the maintenance of character image over textual

content is the role played by the scenery in adaptation. Tenniel’s illustration focused mostly on

characters, leaving the scenery of Wonderland as the only real new ground to be covered. The

Caterpillar’s mushroom perch

is one of the few constants, being one of Tenniel’ illustrations,

otherwise the depiction of Wonderland varies somewhat depending on producer. In Walt

Appendix A fig. 7-22

Disney’s 1951 movie, it was clear the animation was the main draw, “the sequence directors had

started trying to outdo one another” (Gabler 487) to the point where most of the executives

involved believed the movie’s story suffered for it. To some extent the scenery of Alice in

Wonderland (1951) is far more the star of the movie than Alice herself, as the sections between

different sequences have no need to follow any specific logic and are in fact intended to be

whimsical. In most adaptations since Disney, this has remained an important feature, especially

in the wake of computer-generated images (CGI) and the potential to create this level of visual

invention with a real-life cast. The only stand-out from this trend was 1999’s Alice in

Wonderland, where Nick Willing chose instead to portray Wonderland in a more pastoral,

Victorian England type of tame, garden landscape. If the maintenance of Tenniel’s images (or at

least Disney’s interpretation of Tenniel’s images) proves the influence of the original on

adaptations, scenery is where adaptations show their own character.

This is not to say that film adaptations using Tenniel’s illustrations as a main inspiration

ignore Carroll’s writing; many passages are maintained verbatim in film dialogue and many

quotes from the books have become just as iconic as the images. Tenniel’s illustrations have

become a significant epistemological tool for analyzing the text, providing information on the

Hatter’s socioeconomic status and presence in both Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World,

as well as a guiding image of Alice’s appearance which has in many ways shaped her perceived

character. Furthermore, Carroll was just as involved in the production of the images as he was of

the text, making them at least indirectly subject to his authorship. In fact, visual media could

very well have been what Carroll would have wanted to produce himself, had he had access to

our current tools of storytelling – he was, after all, an avid and decently well-known

photographer in his own time.

3.2 Reimagining the Author Through His Images

Of the controversies surrounding Carroll, the greatest concerns his affinity for

photography, specifically photography of nude children. This interest emerged out of a

combination of his longstanding enjoyment of photography and his close relationships with a

number of children, whom he called his “child-friends”. After Alice’s Adventure’s in

Wonderland made Carroll a minor celebrity

, his new role as a children’s author meant an influx

in child-friends. Around 1871, he began documenting interactions with his child-friends in his

diaries, along with their birthdays, likes and dislikes in order to write them letters and think of

games suiting their interests (cf. Cohen 175). As for photographing them, he was careful to

secure the mother’s approval before taking any pictures, as well as “diligently destroy[ing]

failures” (Cohen 165). Around his 50

birthday, records of photographing sessions cease to

appear in Carroll’s diaries, and before his death, “he destroyed most of the negatives and prints

of his nude studies” (Cohen 165). Only six known copies of nude prints Carroll created survive,

four of girls and two rarely mentioned ones of boys, and there is no evidence that he ever took

any of the Liddell sisters. This facet of his personality was not particularly known at the time of

the publication of the Alice books. Cohen speculates that one of his reasons for halting his

photographic efforts in the 1880s was that rumors about his photography were beginning to

spread.

When Karoline Leach mentions the “great chasm of cultural incomprehension” (qtd. in

Brooker 37) between present scholarship and the Victorian era, she is speaking of the difference

between a modern-day response to Carroll’s photographic pursuits and a Victorian one. It is nigh

Carroll was decently well-known as an academic and made a few contributions to the field of

mathematics, as well as being a hobby photographer, but it was Alice that gave him national

recognition.

impossible to convincingly argue whether Carroll’s interest in children was innocent or not;

certainly it would not be seen as such by modern standards. What Victorian commentators would

have to say about it remains unknown, however, as Carroll’s photography was not widely

disseminated and he kept it very private. Leach, who argues that Carroll’s romantic interests

were in adult women and his fascination with childhood was innocent within the context of the

times, claims that the elapsed time prevents understanding of Carroll’s interests in a manner

appropriate for their intention at the time. However, even the earliest biographies of Carroll,

written at the beginning of the 20

century, portray him as “emotionally restrained, “innocent” in

his lack of sexual activity, but obsessed with female children” (Brooker 1). In 1945, Florence

Becker Lennon wrote the first biography suggesting “that Carroll could have been in love with

Alice Liddell” (Brooker 2) and in fact have proposed to her when she was eleven years old, and

since then, this idea haunts Carroll’s biography.

Brooker describes the original idea of Carroll being in love with Alice Liddell as “tacked-

on, speculative, without recourse to new evidence” (Brooker 3), saying that “it allowed Carroll to

retain the Victorian chastity that was part of his nostalgic charm, yet incorporated the

psychoanalytic complexity that the twentieth century demanded” (Brooker 3). That is to say,

especially these early interpretations maintained Carroll’s physical innocence, denying that he

could have acted on any desires he had towards children or others. However, they also provide a

depth to the innocence they portray, making it complex and threatening. Since it has already

been established that Carroll, by the process of fictionalization of Alice’s origin story, becomes

something of a fictional character himself, this twofaced innocence is transferred onto the text of

Alice as well, influencing speculation about Carroll’s life and informing speculation about Alice.

This speculation was already well established when Morton Cohen, one of today’s

leading Carroll biographers, began work on the diaries. These had been in storage for many

years, so Cohen was the first to discover “six razored pages” (Brooker 5), i.e. six pages that had

been carefully cut out of the diaries. According to Cohen, “something occurred during those

three days that caused a break in the relationship [with the Liddells], something that exiled

Charles [Carroll] and cut him off from the children” (Cohen 100), and whatever it was that

happened had to have been scandalous enough for Carroll himself or one of his relatives to cut it

from the diaries. Cohen’s theory is that Carroll suggested a future marriage between himself and

Alice Liddell during these three days missing from the diaries, and that the Liddells turned him

down and broke off contact, fearing the connection between the children and Carroll was now

inappropriate both in terms of the age difference and in terms of Carroll’s relative lack of wealth

and influence. Alice Liddell would have been eleven years old at the time. Of course, Cohen

assumes that “Charles [Carroll] and his contemporaries did not, in fact, understand human

sexuality, and what they thought about it they concealed and ignored” (Cohen 220), an opinion

which maintains the image of Victorian-era repression and innocence but is by no means

accurate. In Kincaid’s words, “it is time we stopped imagining that the subject of sex tied the

tongues of all Victorians” (Kincaid 134).

Biographer Karoline Leach’s counter-argument, as portrayed by Brooker in his

introductory chapter on the developments in Carroll biographies, appears at first to be less far-

fetched: that it is more likely the missing diary pages refer to a relationship with an adult woman,

most likely Mrs. Liddell or the children’s nanny, and were cut from the books by a relative

wishing to hide this, by Victorian standards, scandalous tidbit after Carroll’s death. As for the

nude pictures, which to Cohen are further evidence of Carroll’s sexual interests lying in young

children, Brooker mediating Leach says, “if Carroll was a pervert […] then so was the rest of his

surrounding culture” (Brooker 37). This is perhaps a bold claim about the interests of Victorians

– acknowledging even the vast difference in understanding of childhood and the lack of any

stated concept of pedophilia being widely known and feared at the time, neither nude

photographs of children nor as many close relationships with children as Carroll enjoyed were

common or normal. Then again, it is not any more or less bold than to claim all Victorians were

repressed prudes. Leach substantiates her argument with the claim that she found one of the

missing diary pages, from which she draws the conclusion that Carroll was accused of courting

the Liddell’s governess, but she goes on to say it is far more likely he was having an affair with

Mrs. Liddell.

In Brooker’s analysis of the cumulative work on Carroll’s life, he states that this

is “inevitably just as speculative as Cohen’s theory” (Brooker 24). In essence, “Leach’s key and

most contentious argument is that Carroll had perfectly conventional sexual desires for adult

women” (Leach 37), but this is no easier or more difficult to prove than the opposite.

Brooker’s statements on 20

century fascination with the potential of a dark secret

embedded in Alice’s creation form his explanation of the pedophilia rumor’s popularity, and he

is by no means the only one to believe in this fascination. Valerie Walkerdine’s “Popular Culture

and the Eroticization of Little Girls” discusses the tendency of 20

century popular culture to

take the child as gender-neutral when “actually he is always figured as a boy” (Walkerdine 256).

Girls, on the other hand, are “everything that the child is not supposed to be” (Walkerdine 256).

If Kincaid claims a well-behaved child is unloveable (cf. Kincaid 95), then Walkerdine tells us

She bases this on the note that he is supposedly paying court to the governess and to Ina – Ina

being the nickname both for Lorina, the eldest Liddell daughter, and Lorina, the Liddell mother.

To further her argument she notes the frequency of Mrs. Liddell’s accompanying their outings

and the friendship Carroll enjoyed with her even after the break from the Liddell family (cf.

Brooker 24).

that girls are either unloveable or unchildlike, and she veers toward the latter. According to her

understanding of the way female children are viewed nowadays. They are “to be protected yet to

be constantly alluring” (Walkerdine 257), a hefty burden to place on girls. Walkerdine describes

the entire concept as being “about massive fantasies carried in the culture” (Walkerdine 258),

which place girls in this odd position of being both objects of desire, but not cognizant of this

fact in order to maintain their status as innocents.

Thus, Carroll’s interest in children has remained a point of hot contention. What is certain

is that he had a number of child friends, and that he invested a great deal of time and effort into

maintaining his relationships with them. This is evident from his diaries, as is his friendship with

the Liddells. Some of his photography has also been preserved, including a few shots of the

Liddell sisters. There is no substantial proof, however, that his relationship with them was

anything beyond friendly, nor is there any proof that the nude photography indicates further

misbehavior of any sort. His diaries also reveal intense religious fervor; he was, after all, a

Reverend. This has been taken as further evidence of some “dark secret”, that his occasional

bouts of religious writing were a form of atonement for his “rigidly held in check” (Cohen 43)

desires. Ultimately by now the ability to answer the question of who among these women and

children, if any, Carroll was actually interested in has become unanswerable barring a major

discovery of new primary sources. Carroll’s documents, his diaries, letters and effects, have been

combed through at such great length and breadth that most new analyses thereof rehash the same

question which none of the data can answer satisfactorily. Then again, the debate has in many

ways become a self-nourishing cycle; the question of whether or not Carroll was a pedophile,

despite the inability to provide a conclusive answer, is far more interesting to a world fascinated

with “images of the erotic child” (Kincaid 275), of which Alice has become a leading figure.

Carroll’s interest in image in the form of photography has, for better or for worse, become

instrumental in shaping his own image and that of his works. This is true not only in the

figurative sense of the word “image”, but also in the literal, in that those who believe the “Carroll

myth” (i.e. the pedophilia rumor) use it as grounds for creating darker, more adult images of

Alice, while those who refute it seek out images “authentic” to the original work. If the presence

of the folktale connection inspires adaptation, then the “Carroll myth” also significantly shapes

the responses of different interpretive communities.

3.3 The Film Industry, the 20

Century Child, and Alice

The beginnings of the Carroll myth did not appear in a historical void. Carolyn Sigler, in

the introduction to her anthology of Carroll-related literary work, argues that “the Alice books’

appropriation as high literary culture in the early 1930s marked a significant decline in their

appropriation and interpretation by popular authors” (Sigler xvi). She situates this in the growing

tendency towards Freudian analyses in the 1930s, often to do with repression, making the Alice

books “too complex for children” (Sigler xvi), i.e. the inception of the Carroll myth. Incidentally,

Alice Hargreaves née Liddell passed away in 1934, removing the last living link to the books’

origins, and according to Brooker, the first descriptions of Carroll as “a paedophile, his books

[as] dark allegories, and Alice [as] his obsession” (Brooker xv) occurred in 1945. Both Brooker

and Sigler show that literary adaptations did indeed continue, however, Sigler notes that post-

1930 adaptations are “directed at a sophisticated adult audience” (Sigler xvi) and largely

“unrelated to the books themselves” (Sigler xvi). Whether or not this is entirely accurate is a

different question. Sigler does point out the same drive within Alice’s audiences towards

inscribing adult themes onto the text and using these in adaptation, Brooker notes in his

discussion on how the pedophilia myth gained footing. Additionally, her cut-off date for the

point at which she claims adaptive work no longer reacts to the same social circumstances

Carroll was writing in and becomes more associated with “high art” roughly coincides with the

date at which film versions became more and more popular, with three versions being released in

the 1930s alone. Thus, the rise of the film industry and with it, an ever-increasing number of

Alice adaptations in film, occurred almost simultaneously with the rise of the Carroll myth and

the belief in a deeper relationship between author and addressee. This is unlikely to have been

coincidental, especially because quite a few adaptations include an opening scene of the “golden

afternoon”, featuring a portrayal of Carroll himself within the film.

Aligning the beginnings of cinema history with the literary transition of Alice from an

icon of popular culture to a high art object is a tricky undertaking. Thomas Elsaesser argues that

“cinema has no origins”(Elsaesser 18), because the technology for the production of cinema

predated the actual institution of cinema as a popular pastime by nearly fifty years. In fact,

Victorian society, hungering for “instantaneity, for simultaneity, and interactivity” (Elsaesser 21)

even rejected early cinema prototypes because they were not as advanced as the imaginations

thereof. Additionally, media convergence means that what has occurred is nothing as simple as a

substitution of one medium with another; rather both literature and film persist and carve out

individual, but overlapping spaces for themselves. Thus, the first few movie adaptations of Alice,

released in 1903, 1910 and 1915

, do overlap with Sigler’s timeframe. However, these were all

silent adaptations; perhaps the true shift from literature to film as the primary medium for

popular consumption, such as it was, occurred in 1927, with the Warner Brother’s release of The

Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talkie.

Appendix B Fig. 1

While Sigler critiques the move away from literary children’s media in the 1930s, the

original golden age of the Disney corporation

begins exactly where Sigler leaves off. The

Disney corporation begins with Alice: the first product released by the studio was The Alice

Comedies (1923), a series of comedic shorts featuring “a little girl named Alice, like Alice in

Wonderland, who entered a cartoon world and interacted with cartoon characters”(Gabler 70).

Over the course of the late twenties and early thirties, the corporation released a series of

animated short features, including the iconic beginnings of Mickey Mouse. The first feature film,

Snow White, was released in 1937, to incredible success, which was the beginning of Disney’s

global commercial status. In the following years, Disney released a number of other feature

films, all musical, all animated. As with most companies, Disney experienced a dip in profits

during World War II, and reverted largely to short features for a brief period of time. The early

postwar years saw a return to feature-length animated films, including Cinderella (1950), Alice

in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953). This situates Alice in Wonderland firmly within the

popular trend of family-friendly musical movies, which lasted though the 1960s. While the

poetry within Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is frequently translated into musical form in

film, it is possible, even likely, that musical movies being popular at the time the influential

Disney movie was released are responsible for this trend.

Depending on who is asked, the Disney company can be said to have multiple golden eras – in

the mid to late thirties, at the company’s beginning when their initial run of short films

culminating in the feature film Snow White. The second “golden era” refers to the postwar period

in which Alice was released, along with several other classics such as The Jungle Book, Dumbo,

Cinderella etc. The third “golden era” is also called the Disney renaissance, taking place in the

90s and featuring a resurgence of the animated musical based on a fairy tale. Which age was

truly “golden” seems to depend on the viewer, with “golden” meaning something along the lines

of “most nostalgic to me personally” – similar, maybe, to the meaning of “golden” in Carroll’s

“golden afternoon”.

These years, also noted for the surge in popularity for traditional gender roles and the

American Dream, witnessed what amounted to a return to the idolization of the family structure

of the 1860s and the era when Alice’s Adventures was written. As such, they were fertile ground

for movies idolizing childhood, family and naïveté. In fact, the tendency in Neal Gabler’s

autobiography of Walt Disney is to create such a story out of Disney’s own life, emphasizing

Disney’s desire to “escape” (Gabler 42) his immigrant background and poverty through

following his artistic passions. In creating this narrative, Gabler makes the successes of his films

part of the success of America as a nation. Disney’s early films also existed in an era in which

going to the cinema and broadcast television were still relatively new and exciting, and the

relationship to them was largely characterized by what Henry Jenkins called “passive media

spectatorship” (Jenkins 3) – i.e., unlike today, media producers’ main connection to their

audience was through critical reviews, viewing figures and the amount of money a movie made.

Nowadays, this is significantly different, with the internet and fan forums providing a ready

source for producers to scope the demand and create an adequate supply. By this reckoning,

Alice entered into a cinematic world in which the content and the producer thereof were

attempting to reflect the family ideals of the time without having much actual input from its

audience to define the direction this took.

Nicholas Sammond’s Babes in Tomorrowland analyzes the beginnings of Disney’s work

in a more functional manner. Where Gabler, at least to some extent, embraces the notion of Walt

Disney, the nation’s paternal mogul, Sammond describes Disney as embodying Foucault’s

“author function” (cf. Sammond 364) in which his authority is determined by “a complex

discursive matrix” (Sammond 364) formed by production, response, success and form of his

products. Furthermore, Sammond makes a point of showing that both the figure of Disney and

the figure of the child for whom he was making movies are discursively created. This does not

mean he is criticizing Disney or Disney’s modes of production; it means he is interested in

Disney largely in the role his corporation played both as a founding factor for the understanding

of childhood in the 20

century and as a media producer responding to what he saw as the nature

of the demand for childhood-related subjects. The notion of a creator being created by his

audience relates Disney to Carroll in a fundamental way: the telling of his story always mirrors

the telling of himself.

In order to facilitate this analysis, Sammond tracks the notion of childhood from the early

century manuals of child-rearing, in which the child had a developmental schedule on which

it must be kept and it was the responsibility of its parents (especially mothers) to ensure it did so.

Throughout the 20

century, these manuals became more focused on individuality, culminating

in teaching parents to adapt their parenting techniques to their own child rather than keeping

their child on track of the development of a single universal Child. Many of these textbooks also

mentioned a need for “regulation of media consumption” (Sammond 111), however offered little

advice of how exactly media was to be regulated. While it is the case that since the dawn of

cinema, adults feared inappropriate materials, this became especially a factor in the 30s and 40s,

when film became more available, profitable and wide-spread than it had been previously. In

1930, the Motion Picture Production Code (also known as the Hays code) was adopted for the

purpose of restricting risqué content in films in order to protect children. What Sammond argues

about child-rearing mentality of 20

century America makes a significant contrast to that of 19

century Britain. Where Frost portrays a nation focused on the role of the family and parenting,

and Wullschläger and Cohen point towards a literary and artistic culture almost obsessed with

purity and innocence, 20

century America appears more interested in the child as an

investment. To Sammond, “they are simultaneously the creatures of their parents and of the state,

but not yet individuals unto themselves” (Sammond 4), meaning that children are a reflection of

the parents raising them but simultaneously form the nation’s future. The child becomes

“embodied potential” (Sammond 4), having both no and potentially all identities represented by

the nation as a whole. This coalition of interests supersedes the child itself as a person; a notion

which parenting trends attempted to rectify by intense focus on the individual. This places the

child portrayed in Alice in a different position in 1951 than in 1856. Her individuality becomes

key, because it is what distinguishes the real child from the nation’s imagined child. To Carroll’s

time, her mimicry of social forms in an attempt (and failure) is what makes her a child; her

process of learning is childlike. To Disney’s time, in order to be childlike, she would have to test

boundaries and break rules.

3.4 A Very Unhappy Unbirthday

– Alice’s Second Origin

Though Disney clearly had a personal connection to the project, having chosen the Alice

Comedies as the first product for the Disney company to market, and though Alice in

Wonderland is remembered fondly by many people today, at the time, the movie was regarded as

something of a failure. It performed poorly at the box office and did not garner much critical

support; it was rereleased on television a number of times, but was only released for home

viewing many years later. The concept for the movie had been around already five years prior to

the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves; Roy Disney, Walt’s brother and business

partner, had inquired about the rights to Alice “as early as June 1932” (Gabler 215), and had

learned that Carroll’s book was in the public domain. The actual adaptation was released twenty

During the Mad Tea Party, the Mad Hatter wishes Alice a happy unbirthday; this becomes a

musical number in the Disney version entitled “A Very Happy Unbirthday”

years later. It was Disney’s eleventh purely animated feature film

, and eighteenth feature film

in total (cf. Gabler 635). It followed on the heels of a series of a series of mildly disappointing

films. Disney had high hopes for Alice, saying in an interview that Alice would be the company’s

first “real post-war production” (qtd, in Gabler 477). However, Disney would not be satisfied

with this film either.

In 1947, he had “hired English writer Alduous Huxley to do a screenplay” (Gabler 459);

in meetings, Disney proceeded to dominate the discussion so thoroughly that Huxley “couldn’t

get in a word” (Gabler 486) and subsequently quit. Bob Carr, an early head of the story

department, lamented that “there is no story in the book” (qtd. in Gabler 486). Moreover, he had

concerns about Alice as a lead character. “She plays a straight man to a cast of screw-ball

comics” (qtd. in Gabler 486), an “untenable position” (qtd. in Gabler 486) for a main character. It

wasn’t the animation that was in question, it was the lack of cohesive storyline and the role Alice

as a character took which made for a problematic project. Disney shared these concerns, but had

been urged many times over the years to complete the project by what Ben Sharpsteen, one of

Disney’s directors and producers, called “especially sophisticated people” (qtd. in Gabler 486)

who were influential in the Hollywood scene. This interest was largely artistic and not

necessarily commercially feasible. This mirrors Sigler’s statements that Alice became an object

of high art in the 1930s; film adaptations were sought after at this period in time. Disney changed

his mind several times regarding the lead actress and much of the content, admitting that “he

would have bumped it for Peter Pan had that film been ready” (Gabler 487), but ultimately the

studio was forced to release the film. Following the film’s release, Disney said both that he had

been “trapped into making ‘Alice in Wonderland’ against [his] better judgment” (qtd. in Gabler

Gabler differentiates between animated films, live-action films and combinations of the two

487) and that “it’s terribly tough to transfer whimsy to the screen” (qtd. in Gabler 487). This

indicates both that he was dissatisfied with the product as an artist and a producer, but also that

the creators of the film found their problem to be in the source material. The fantastical,

whimsical nature of the text was ideal for animation, but the Victorian manners presented by

Alice herself and the episodic format were not fit for the 1950s style of moviemaking. The child

created by Carroll is no longer the child as the world of 1951 sees it, and thus cannot carry the

entire movie by herself. The result is too well-behaved to be interesting to Disney’s audience,

and too fanciful to be acceptable to Carroll’s audience.

Alice, which was not as popular as Snow White or Cinderella upon release, but unlike

these, benefitted from the drug culture of the 1960s, enjoyed renewed popularity in the latter

quarter of the century

. The wealth of re-releases and re-formatting especially in the 1990s and

2000s after a dip in the production of animated movies throughout the latter half of the 20

century led to the movie’s current popularity among the younger generation as a staple Disney

classic despite its rocky beginnings. It also has significant fan following among adults, possibly

precisely because Alice has become a text for adults within the context of the rumors about

Carroll. The nostalgic value the film has becomes retroactive in this sense, as knowledge about

One of Disney’s most important marketing strategies is to re-release films not in terms of

demand, but in a limited amount after a given number of years to drive up scarcity. Thus, Alice

first appeared on VHS in 1981. Subsequently, every four or five years a new edition would be

released, including the “Masterpiece edition” in 2004, which featured a variety of previously

unseen production material. In 2010, to accompany the Tim Burton film, also a product of the

Disney corporation, an “Un-Anniversary” edition was released. In 2011, only a year later, a 60

anniversary Blu-ray edition was released. Products the corporation is not as proud of as Alice do

not enjoy such frequent re-releases. “Der Fuehrer’s Face”, now somewhat controversial, has only

been re-released twice since 1943, both in the context of longer documentary features on the

Disney corporation’s history. Song of the South, the extremely controversial half-animated, half-

live-action vehicle for Uncle Remus stories that the company has since then regarded as possibly

its greatest failure, remains locked in “the Disney Vault” and is not likely to be re-released,

though Splash Mountain, the ride in Disneyland based on Song of the South, remains popular.

the book and its author increase with age, allowing the film to become more nuanced when

watched again as an adult.

This is not to say that children cannot enjoy Disney’s Alice. Where Michael Hancher had

argued that the original text of Alice might be too difficult for a child to handle alone,

necessitating an adult reader-aloud, Disney’s version is explicitly intended for a family audience.

Disney’s adaptation eliminates many of the more conceptually tricky aspects from both books

while picking out scenes and moments from both books to adapt into Alice in Wonderland

regardless of their original placement. For instance, the chess game set-up from Through the

Looking Glass is gone, isolating several of the more iconic figures from the Looking-Glass world

and placing them in Wonderland instead. Additionally, much of Alice’s loss of agency and

confusion, especially towards the beginning of the story, is displaced and only hinted at towards

the denouement as a reason for Alice to leave Wonderland and return home. In fact, in the

opening musical number she expresses a strong desire for a world where everything is nonsense,

foreshadowing Wonderland.

Alice’s alarming shifts in size do occur as in the book, confusing her sense of identity,

but her concurrent loss of place in terms of her studies and her inability to correctly recite verse

is transmitted to other characters. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, taken from Through the

Looking Glass and placed in Wonderland between the Caucus Race and Frederick Rabbit’s

House, perform a musical rendition of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and, as Alice is leaving,

begin the parodied version of “You Are Old, Father William”, which in the book Alice recited

incorrectly to the Caterpillar (cf. Carroll 52). When actually talking to the Caterpillar, he tells her

to recite, and she begins with “How Doth the Little Busy Bee” – the original version, which in

the book, Alice misremembers as “How Doth the Little Crocodile” (Carroll 23). In Disney’s

version, she remembers the correct poem and the Caterpillar impatiently stops her and recites the

“improved” “How Doth the Little Crocodile”. Alice is thereby far more in control of her faculties

than in the books. It is the world she is in which is confusing, not she herself. This rewrite also

speaks to the durability of Carroll’s nonsense. It is his poetry that becomes the “right” version,

lasting and iconic, not the original it was based on. This almost eradicates Wonderland’s ties to

the real world by not even allowing its characters to remember poems from there.

In fact, Alice as a character is treated far more kindly, or perhaps unrealistically by

Disney than by Carroll. Where in the books, she as often insulted the creatures of Wonderland as

they did her, became confused as to her identity, and had little to no idea of where she was going

or what she was doing, in the movies, her behavior is impeccable. With the exception of not

heeding her lessons at the beginning of the movie, she rarely causes offense; only once when

referencing her cat in front of the Dormouse, for which she immediately apologizes. In the book,

when she becomes too large to fit into Frederick Rabbit’s house, Bill the Lizard is sent down the

chimney to confront her; she kicks him back out, arguably one of the more brutal moments in the

books. Disney’s Alice sneezes involuntarily, expelling him from the house, for which she feels

guilty afterwards. Similarly softening the difficulties in her character, though she complains that

she “give[s herself] very good advice but [she] very seldom follow[s] it” (Disney) there is little

evidence of bad-temperedness Caterpillar accuses her of in the book (cf. Carroll 51). It is also

notable that Disney called her far too “cold” (Gabler 486) a character to carry a movie and yet

erased her more humanizing character traits, such as her misremembering poetry, her petulance

and her irritability. She becomes flawed by the flawlessness with which she is portrayed, while

Wonderland takes on her flaws and becomes less welcoming.

In order to create something of a plot where in the book there was none, Alice’s goal

throughout the first two thirds or so of the movie is to find the white rabbit she was following

when she fell down the rabbit-hole. Where the book rabbit vanishes fairly early on only to

reappear at the croquet game, and Alice loses interest in him, the film Alice continues to search

for him even after having been in his house. It is only after the Mad Tea Party, when she is lost

in the Tulgey Wood (a visual adaptation from the “Jabberwocky”, another borrowed Looking-

Glass element), that Alice’s priorities begin to shift towards finding her way home. In a musical

sequence strikingly reminiscent of a moment in Disney’s Snow White, when its heroine is also

lost in the woods, alone and frightened, Alice reveals that at this point her main goal is to return

home. This follows standard tropes of modern screenwriting; the main character begins wanting

one thing, and through a series of events leading to character development realizes that really,

they wanted something else, or should have appreciated what they had all along. However, after

her realization, Alice must detour through the croquet sequence and subsequent trial (skipping

her run-in with the Griffin and the Mock-Turtle). Notably, it is Alice who is on trial and not the

Knave of Hearts; Alice is directly in danger in a way she never is in the books, perhaps making

the film less adult in terms of vocabulary and conception but more so in terms of emotional

upheaval.

Running from the trial, Alice passes through most of the backgrounds she crossed getting

there in the first place, emphasizing that the true artistry of the film lies not so much in the

adaptations made to the story but in the images and animation created based on it. Frequently,

the film cuts classic lines from the book, including most of Alice’s inner monologue as she falls

down the rabbit hole to focus instead on the images set to music. With the use of bright colorings

for the more fantastic scenes and darker ones for the more threatening moments, certain parts of

exposition become irrelevant. Showcasing the artistic talent involved leads to lingering in certain

sequences that, in the books, took up less relative space. The musical numbers also take up a

large portion of the film’s time. These two feature coalesce most notably perhaps in the musical

number sung by the flowers (another Looking-Glass feature) entitled “All in the Golden

Afternoon”, in which far more flowers than are mentioned in the book skip over most of their

dialogue and instead sing as a chorus-cum-orchestra about a “golden afternoon”. The title is a

reference to the first line of the poem prefacing Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures, in which he talks

about the afternoon on which he first told the Liddell sisters the first version of Alice.

Disney’s Alice was not the first film adaptation, nor was it the last by far. It did, however,

have a lasting influence on all late films, I would argue. In a way, Disney’s Alice became a new

point of origin for modernity; in a culture generally more inclined towards movie-going than

Victorian literature, Disney’s Alice being situated as a staple childhood classic provides a basis

for Carroll’s Alice to stay relevant. The original book becomes not the point of origin in

discovering Alice but rather phase two, sought out by true devotees. Partially, this is due to

corporate ownership – the Disney corporation is one of six corporations which own, control or

produce 90% of film and television media in the world today (cf. “Media Consolidation: The

Illusion”). Thus, Disney can both increase air time for its own movie on television as well as

make sure that many of the following adaptations are slated as sequels to Disney’s first

adaptation, or use the Disney movie as their basis for understanding Alice in general. Still other

movies base their artistic content on Tenniel’s illustrations. Adaptations vary in format and

length, though they are almost universally critically despised. Failure of Alice adaptations to

perform well both critically and in almost all cases in the box office as well has in no way

dampened the enthusiasm for making them; it appears Alice is a text that cries out to be adapted,

perhaps because no adaptation could satisfy the longing to capture a non-existent child. The next

point of interest in examining how Alice appears in popular culture today is to view the wealth of

film material post-Disney which is currently well-known and well-liked, to analyze the trends

appearing within these adaptations and to see who Alice has become today. Over the course of

the next chapter, I will do so using primarily adaptations released in the last two decades.

4. “Some of the Words Have Got Altered”

4.1 Alice Adaptation: Commonalities and Inconsistencies

Two writers may interpret the very same data in quite different fashion, and that is precisely

the point. Any analysis of an item of folklore should begin where previous analyses have

ended. (Dundes xvi)

Having established Alice’s multiple points of origins, the next question is, what becomes of

her? Tracking the image of Alice through the years is a difficult proposition. If folklorist Alan

Dundes says new analysis should begin where the old left off, it should perhaps be taken more as

an acknowledgement of the fact that no one adaptation can be severed fully from the rich history

surrounding Alice, no matter which point of origin might be the most present in the adaptation.

This mingling of origins could include the historical, the literary, the folkloric, or the visual, but

the references to these origins do not appear separate from each other. Rather, a mixture of them

might be noticeable, or one might be the adapter’s main focus, but invariably, a multitude of

influences is present. It is this relation of adaptations to an idea of origins which I intend to track

over the course of this chapter.

One of the guiding concepts through which I analyze adaptations in this chapter is that due to

the intense interrelation between understanding of origins and understanding of the text itself,

adaptations are in and of themselves interpretations of Alice. Concurrently, I will be treating film

adaptations as a form of narrative fiction. I will accomplish this study of adaptions by examining

similarities and differences between adaptations of Alice. Most of the adaptations I examine are

film adaptations and other media adaptations released in America in roughly the last fifteen

years, which I will analyze in terms of content as well as discussing how these relate back to the

themes and trends of previous chapters. I chose this particular set of Alice adaptations based on

their popularity among a group of fans I surveyed. This is because I am interested in establishing

Alice to the Caterpillar, excusing her rendition of “You Are Old, Father William” (Carroll 54)

not only the views taken by the artists and producers who create Alice adaptations but also in

those taken by the interpretative community of fans in their consumption of said material. The

latter will be the focus of chapter five, while the former will be the discussed over the course of

this chapter. Here, I hope to show how Alice’s current portrayal in popular media, for the most

part film, is influenced both by understanding of the story’s origins as well as by current moral

beliefs regarding that origin and current artistic and narrative standards.

Alice adaptations, like Alice herself, come in many shapes and sizes. There are many

versions of illustration, usually based on the Tenniel drawings. That is to say, frequently the

illustrations follow the Tenniel ones in their subjects and their placement within the text. The

creation of new interpretations of each scene is done both by established artists for profit but also

among fans. There are many literary adaptations, including transformative work (fanfiction,

image editing in video format and as still images) by and for fans, as well adaptations as video

games or comics. The vast majority of Alice adaptation, however, is film material. There are a

number of basic trends within these films. In her essay “Body as Wonderland”, critic Helen

Pilinovsky sorts adaptations into “those that continue Alice’s original adventures in their

Victorian setting, those that update her still childish situation into more contemporary

circumstances, and those that diverge from their surroundings to focus on her maturation”

(Pilinovsky 176). Given that the actual sequel, “continuing Alice’s original adventures”, has

become something of a rarity, and the occasional difficulty in distinguishing between the latter

two categories, I have chosen to simplify the basic trends by which I analyze Alice films. The

two categories I will examine are “straight” adaptations seeking only to create a film version of

While there are also several surrealist Alice adaptations and adaptations with agendas in the

context of trends in the art world, I have chosen not to discuss these here and focus instead on the

popular films as my interest lies in reception as well as production.

the books, and “adult” adaptations, in which Alice as a character is made into an adult and the

content of the film is darker and intended for an older audience. Pilinovsky’s categories remain

relevant, however, in thinking about adaptations, as the changes to Alice’s character, either in

terms of how she acts or in terms of how old she is, are central in analyzing adaptations. Most of

these films share the same title, Alice in Wonderland, which is not in fact the original title of

Carroll’s books, but rather acknowledges their iconic status. This probably stems from the

Disney movie, but the question is why the alteration happens in the first place – to indicate it is

not the same content as the book? To remove the active part Alice takes in the title Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland? To remove the plurality of plots implied in “Adventures”? At any

rate, the name becomes tied to the plethora of adapted material sharing it, providing this more

generic title with a sense of malleability.

Most of the post-1951 versions of Alice are live-action, though there are a few more animated

versions. Many newer adaptations also feature computer generated imaging (CGI) to portray

Wonderland itself, which can become the central focus of the adaptation if, as mentioned in

chapter three, a new portrayal of setting and scenery is where the adaptation shines. In Will

Brooker’s Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Media, he analyzes five Alice film

adaptations which stay fairly close to the source material and establishes certain commonalities.

Why, then, do all these adaptations, despite their variation, feature the Tea Party, the White

Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the croquet game and […] the “Drink Me” bottle and the “Eat Me”

cake? The only reasonable explanation is that these are regarded as iconic elements without

which the story would seem lacking, that each director sees them as necessary to and

expected of Alice in Wonderland, whatever other changes are made to the plot and detail.

(Brooker 205)

According to Brooker, there are a number of standard features in each adaptation. Without them,

a film is not recognizable as an Alice adaptation. In lieu of adapting the plot or the major themes

of the text, neither of which are apparent in Alice, Brooker suggests that directors adapt those

moments from the text which are the most iconic. There are a few other commonalities he cites,

such as Alice entering Wonderland through “some form of tunnel or hole” (Brooker 203) and the

fact that “we have to see Alice in the real world for Wonderland to figure as a dream” (Brooker

204). Brooker examines these sequences closely, establishing that none of them are truly

necessary. For instance, the size changes Alice goes through are adapted fairly faithfully, though

arguably they could be diminished in number

, or eradicated entirely without losing much as

they are often not mentioned again after they occur. However, Alice without her size changes

would no longer be Alice. This is not to say that these particular traits are set in stone - which

stations precisely occur is up to the interpreter, but a few of them appear fairly consistently as

inalienable parts of the story. Why exactly it is these sequences which are iconic and not Humpty

Dumpty or Alice meeting the Duchess remains an enigma; Brooker suggests that “the powerful

and pervasive influence of Disney’s retellings” (Brooker 205) is to blame. In a way, what is

acknowledged by giving Disney credit for the trends in adaptation is that each adaptation

influences the next, and the process of making certain scenes iconic more than others is a self-

sustaining cycle. The act of viewing a scene as iconic enough to be included in an adaptation is

what makes it iconic enough to be included in future adaptations.

The standard Alice adaptation in film exhibits a heavy focus on scenery; it features usually a

cast of famous actors in minor roles with an ingénue in Alice’s role. Frequently, the film is put

together by mixing the sequences of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the

Looking-Glass to form one cohesive whole, usually referred to as “Wonderland”. Film or stage

In the book, Alice first changes size after falling into Wonderland through the rabbit hole, she

drinks the “Drink Me” bottle and shrinks, and then eats the “Eat Me” cake and grows. Then, she

cries, and as she cries, she shrinks again. In Frederick Rabbit’s house, she drinks another bottle

and becomes too large to fit in the house, and then eats another cake and slips out through the

doorway, and finally, when she finds the Caterpillar, he tells her which parts of the mushroom to

eat to effect which change, giving her control of her size.

adaptations also often use the poetry-heavy source text as an origin for musical adaptation.

Generally, these songs are neither well-remembered nor well-reviewed. Notable examples of this

type of movie include the 1973 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, starring Fiona Fullerton and

directed by William Sterling, Alice in Wonderland (1983), a filmed stage performance directed

by Kirk Browning, and Alice in Wonderland (1999), directed by Nick Willing

. These are only

three among a list containing over forty adaptations; they are simply some of the currently better-

remembered “straight” adaptations. Here, the above tropes and sequences Brooker mention are

easily spotted; by contrast, adaptations seeking to expand the material or provide an “adult” Alice

use a number of different techniques.

More adult or contemporary films, TV shows and other forms of media based on Alice

include Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland

and Nick Willing’s 2009 Alice

. Additionally,

currently well-remembered adaptations of Alice not in film format which aspire towards a more

adult aesthetic include Frank Beddor’s young adult book trilogy The Looking-Glass Wars

American McGee’s 2000 computer game Alice

. These adaptations do not necessarily exhibit

Brooker’s list of scenes that must occur in a recognizable fashion. Largely, this is because these

adaptations assume familiarity with the source material. They assume that the viewer has seen

these scenes before and subvert them rather than showing ‘tired’ or overly familiar material

again. This is especially noticeable in Tim Burton’s adaptation – here, an adult Alice who

assumes her childhood experience in Wonderland was a fanciful dream wanders through the

scenery of Wonderland and finds herself experiencing déjà vu, culminating in her confrontation

see Appendix B, Fig. 1

see Appendix B 3

see Appendix B 2

see Appendix C 1

see Appendix C 2

by Wonderland’s inhabitants. The movie functions as something of a sequel to the original

Disney movie, being a product of the Disney corporation. It is one of only two well-remembered

adaptations which is conceived as a sequel (the other being American McGee’s Alice).

Changing in the character of Alice is what provides many of these adaptations with a plot and

a forward drive. In all cases listed above, she is an adult, or at least an adolescent, and her

presence in Wonderland can no longer be simply a dream. For Burton, she is the savior, returned

as an adult to Wonderland to release its inhabitants from the rule of the Red Queen (a synthesis

of both Red Queen and Queen of Hearts)

. For Frank Beddor, Alice is really Alice Liddell, but

Alice Liddell is the orphaned princess of Wonderland whose parents sent her into the parallel

dimension of Oxford, England, where her story was completely bowdlerized by Charles

Dodgson

. The American McGee computer game adaptation has a troubled teenager battling her

own psyche in a series of fights against Wonderland characters; the Willing version features an

Alice entirely unrelated to Carroll’s Alice who, again, must save Wonderland from the evil

Queen’s dominion

. In all cases, Alice’s stature as a pawn (literally, in Through the Looking-

Glass) must be called into question in order for her to be a leading, adult character. Whimsy and

coincidence are no longer sufficient explanations for Wonderland and her role within it; Alice

requires both an internal character arc and an external plot to become feasible on the screen.

As a case in point, Nick Willing’s Alice forms part of a larger trajectory. Willing, having

directed the live-action children’s movie Alice in Wonderland in 1999, a fairly faithful rendition

of the books, returns to Alice in 2009, with a made-for-TV two-part miniseries entitled simply

Alice. Willing is neither an influential Hollywood director, nor were his films released in

see Appendix B3

see Appendix C1

see Appendix C2

cinemas, they went straight to TV. However, given their recent release and the high video

quality, his adaptations are well-remembered and well-preserved, available on Youtube and

Netflix. Additionally, most Alice movies prior to Willing’s received uniformly terrible reviews,

making each new version which was not widely reported upon release potentially superior to its

predecessors. This is not to say that Willing’s versions received glowing praise – no Alice

adaptation has had that honor – but they were relatively unknown at the time of release and have

since garnered fan followings, as have most of the still well-known films. In analyzing popular

films, this shows a gap between critical reception and actual popularity, given that if only critical

and commercial success were measured, no Alice adaptation would stand out. In terms of

popularity, however, Nick Willing’s adaptations are still doing fairly well.

Willing’s 2009 Alice followed his 2007 miniseries “Tin Man”, a similar darker-and-grittier

spin on L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. In a way, this makes Alice a part of a larger dialogue, one

that includes The Wizard of Oz and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which merited its own spin-off in

2011 (Neverland), also directed by Willing. This dialogue is one of genre, all three belonging to

the category of children’s fantasy now being adapted for young adult to adult audiences. The

Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan originated in the early 20

century, roughly forty years after Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland were published. However, all three were made into classic children’s

musical movies in the mid 20

century, first the live-action MGM film The Wizard of Oz in 1939

and then Disney’s Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, in 1951 and 1953 respectively. It is

partially this temporal association with each other as well as with Disney’s Snow White (1937),

Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), all based on Grimm’s fairy tales, which has

maintained a connection of the three with the loose category of 20

century American notions of

the updated “fairy tale”. Carolyn Sigler tracks the Alice-type narrative through magazines and

books that, while popular at the time, are for the most part lost to the casual modern consumer.

While she, she makes no explicit connection between Alice and J.M.Barrie’s Peter Pan or L.

Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, there are a few striking resemblances: all three feature young girls

whisked away into fantastic magical lands; all three are episodic in one form or another, Alice

and Peter Pan more so than The Wizard of Oz, which was released as a series. Baum even cited

Alice as an inspiration for his work. A brief look at these parallel traditions helps us to

understand how the coinciding timing of seminal musical adaptations for children have led all

three works to a similar status in modern works adapting them. Alice being the first of them, this

also demonstrates how Alice’s quasi-fairy tale role and contested past have influenced similar

works.

Of the three authors, only Baum escaped accusations of pedophilia due to connections to

young children; this is perhaps because both Barrie and Carroll are supposed to have based their

most famous literary characters on real child acquaintances. Nonetheless, all three texts and

characters are in a way iconic and “belong together” typologically. This association, creating the

odd not-quite-fairy-tale aesthetic of the works and their adaptations, which are numerous in all

cases, informs some of the choices in Willing’s directorial work. The scenery especially in Alice

(2009) is far removed from the pastoral imagery of Carroll’s original and instead features

untamed forests with no pathways, broad open rivers and lakes as well as dilapidated cityscapes;

the sprawl of this world is perhaps more Oz than Wonderland, or more American than British.

Additionally, the link between the three stories and the fairy tale genre is not limited to Willing’s

involvement: the Disney-owned ABC series Once Upon A Time features characters from all

three stories

. Once Upon A Time is another adaptation involving Alice, even having a spin-off

entitled Once Upon A Time in Wonderland, focusing on Alice characters introduced in the

original show. This series is an especially interesting case, as the source material referenced is

largely from the Disney movies because both the show and the network producing it are owned

by Disney, while more threatening aspects of older versions of fairy tales are drawn in to create

higher stakes for a presumed adult viewing audience.

The association of these three texts with each other is enough to create a sub-genre, but their

association with fairy tales is what ultimately causes the wealth of adapted material. Alice’s

relation to fairy tales and visual media predates film versions, as discussed in chapters two and

three, which explains why there are more versions of Alice than of either of the other two; Peter

Pan was not illustrated and the original illustrations in Baum’s book did not become quite as

famous as Tenniel’s Alice illustrations. Their origin stories, while famous, also did not become

quite as pervasively popular as Alice’s. Likewise, Alice is never outshined by her surroundings in

Carroll’s books – she remains quite firmly the center of attention no matter how bizarre

Wonderland becomes. The same cannot be said of Peter Pan or the Wizard of Oz

, but then,

both Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz have stakes and a plot. On the whole, however, the

connection among these texts provides Alice with a status to boast, as part of a subgenre of

While Disney owns the rights to their own film versions of Alice and Peter Pan, imagery from

which heavily influences their representation in Once Upon A Time, they do not own the rights to

the Warner Bros. film The Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum’s books, however, are in the public

domain. Once Upon A Time also takes place partially in the modern world and partially in the

“enchanted forest” – the setting of all fairy tales. The separation of characters from setting allows

for greater variability in their interpretation.

Wendy and Peter Pan feature equally as protagonists in Peter Pan in addition to much time

and focus of the book being spent on Captain Hook, the Lost Boys and other characters. While

Dorothy may begin as the protagonist of The Wizard of Oz, the books became a successful

franchise and especially in later parts other characters begin to eclipse her, including characters

native to Oz.

fantasy or of children’s literature, a place in a literary trajectory that marks it as something other

than ‘unique’. As for the association of all three narratives with fairy tales, partially the timing of

the Disney adaptations is to blame and partially Alice’s longstanding association with fairy tales.

Either way, the fairy tale connection provides a solid basis for adaptability in that fairy tales are

frequently rewritten or turned into films updating their moral content for new readers or

audiences. Alice may not purport to have moral content, but a new moral context for readers in

the late 20

and early 21

century in fact does exist and demands an updating and re-envisioning

of the material.

These more adult versions showcase a different understanding of Alice’s role in Wonderland

as their primary feature. She needs to have a purpose there, and frequently, the characters are not

“mad”, they are misunderstood or subjected, and it is her role to save them in some way.

Wonderland frequently becomes a metaphor for sociopolitical injustice in these forms of

adaptation, or else a metaphor for Alice’s own process of self-actualization. Wonderland is the

threat, Alice is the solution – very much unlike Carroll’s text, in which Alice acts as creator and

destroyer of world unto herself, as well as unwitting pawn and helpless child. It could be argued

that taking Carroll’s text at face value gives Alice’s character greater depth than many of the

adaptations of it do – then again, the adult adaptations especially focus heavily on fleshing out

Wonderland and its inhabitants, making it a real space as opposed to an imagined one (after all,

who doesn’t have an image in their minds of what Wonderland looks like?). In context with

Pilinovsky’s argumentation that Alice adaptations tend to either focus on a modernization of

Alice’s content or a maturation of Alice’s character, the two trends of adaptation I examine

reveal similar interests. In the “straight” adaptation, the focus is on Alice’s maturation, while in

the more adult retelling, Alice is lifted into more contemporary circumstances and taken as a

blank slate upon which to write. This deletion of Alice’s complexity perhaps explains her

frequently being acted by a young, unknown actress – she will not inspire the same level of

recognition and of prejudice a known actress would. Alice, both in body and in spirit becomes

unrecognizable in these retellings.

4.2 “Narrativizing” – Plot Conventions in Film Media

How, then, is Alice remade as a character to fit a modern film schema? One of the most

important differences between books and film, especially in the latter part of the 20

century and

early 21

century, is the plot conventions involved in the latter. Film is not, or at least has not

been, popularly utilized as a medium for vignette, arguably the form closest to Carroll’ s original

text. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as has been discussed previously, consists largely of

vignettes. Thus, the primary challenge faced by directors in adapting Alice is creating a narrative

arc familiar enough to a film audience so as not to alienate casual moviegoers, as well as an

adaptation of the source material faithful enough to not alienate Alice fans. Alternatively, of

course, some of the adaptors choose only to satisfy one of these two groups of viewers. Many of

the adaptations feature a coming-of-age story for Alice. In Disney’s version, her character arc in

Wonderland is understanding that she wants to go home. This adaptation is not heavy on plot;

the New York Times characterized it as having a “a somewhat slow, uneven pace” (Crowther).

The only real plot thread is Alice’s emotional state. The same is true for Nick Willing’s 1999

adaptation, though it has a clearer progression in terms of Alice’s development – she begins

being scared of performing in front of her parents’ tea party, and during her wanderings through

Wonderland she becomes “confident”. If Alice was too “cold” (Gabler 486) for Disney, the

primary goal in adapting her for the screen later is to give her a purpose, a challenge to

overcome, a form of personal growth to tie together her disparate adventures.

Willing makes a number of marked stylistic departures from the 1951 version in his 1999

film. Orienting himself more clearly to Tenniel’s illustrations than other any previous film

adaptation, he chooses to have Alice appear as a brunette in a yellow dress

, following the

original coloring of Tenniel’s illustrations from The Nursery Alice

. Where the Disney Alice

was always falling, being swept along by the hectic pace of animation – perhaps most

memorably during her initial fall down the rabbit-hole, where her skirt becomes a parachute and

she gently sways through a series of backgrounds, exposing her undergarments – Willing’s

Alice, portrayed by Tina Marjorino, is far more staid and dignified. The overarching theme of the

adaptation is performance; Alice is supposed to perform at her parent’s garden party and is afraid

to, thus transforming her poetry mishaps into a sort of stage fright. Meanwhile, the poetry recited

by the inhabitants of Wonderland is often transmogrified into musical form and is presents an

opportunity for her to overcome her fear of performance. Willing’s 1999 Alice has more of the

book’s negative characteristics than does her Disney counterpart. Even so, She does not insult

the Wonderland residents; she does lose her temper frequently, with the Caterpillar and the Mad

Hatter, and finally with the Queen of Hearts herself. Due to the contrivance of her performance

anxiety, she is also far more shy and reticent than other Alices. Willing admits that he had “a

rough time trying to translate” (Willing) Carroll’s Alice into a movie due to the lack of a plot; by

doing so, he implies that in the medium of film, stories cannot be told as a series of vignettes.

Moreover, he implies that there must be a story that is told in a form readily understood by

popular audiences.

The more adult adaptations go to greater lengths to connect the sequences within Alice; as

mentioned above, these versions often have some form of social or political commentary

Appendix A fig. 12

Appendix A, fig. 9

involved. This serves in some way to demote Alice’s quest for identity; the larger stakes of

Wonderland’s future as a whole often determine the denouement, and while Alice’s self-

actualization is part of creating this finale, they are only the set-up, not the pay-off. For instance,

in Willing’s 1999 adaptation of the book, intended for a family audience, the plot he invents to

make the book a palatable film is essentially rooted in the frame narrative, in the real world, and

the major developments are centered on Alice’s internal state. By contrast, in Willing’s 2009

Alice, the protagonist of the film is not the real Alice, which is made clear from the start. She is

established as a savior, but her role has been predetermined by a set of events and the actions of

characters prior to her arrival; she becomes once again a pawn, though she is masquerading as a

knight.

This is evidenced in that most of the major dramatic moments of the adaptation are

transmitted to male characters. Alice’s emotional stakes are in finding her father and her

relationships with Jack and Hatter, all of which are resolved by the men, not her. In the third act

of the series (if a three-act structure is applicable, which is by no means certain), these threads

are all tied up; the King of Hearts and the Knave of Hearts (both sympathetic characters) stand

up to the Queen of Hearts, Charlie the White Knight at last is allowed to be heroic, the Carpenter

remembers Alice is his daughter and allows himself to be killed to save her. Finally, Hatter wins

over Alice. Alice’s main contributions to emotional catharsis are to make peace with her lifelong

quest to find her father, arguably accomplished by the Carpenter’s death scene, and turning down

Jack’s proposal of marriage.

Ironically given the fact that it is titled “Alice”, the 2009 miniseries is the adaptation that

focuses the least on her; both Disney’s 1951 version and Willing’s 1999 version (both intended

as movie versions of the book, not addressed to an adult audience) follow the structure of the

books, thus simply tailing Alice’s wanderings through Wonderland with a camera and allowing

her more of a stake in the story. Even Burton, who goes to greater lengths to create a Hollywood

plot and an adult version of the story, rarely strays from Alice’s story; if and when he does, it is

only to show other characters talking about her. Willing’s 2009 Alice on the other hand becomes

one central part in a large ensemble cast. While she is unquestionably the lead character, her arc

mainly establishes that her own interests are not as important as the fate of Wonderland as a

whole.

Tim Burton’s 2010 version also expands the role of the male cast members to be central and

includes a romantic plot. In most adaptations featuring an adult Alice, this is fairly common,

perhaps because Hollywood plot conventions demand this for a leading adult female in film. In

this version, the Hatter and the Knave of Hearts both become love interests, Hatter for Alice,

though it is never explicitly stated and she chooses to leave Wonderland in the end, and the

Knave of Hearts for the Red Queen. The latter is particularly interesting as the Red Queen’s

attraction to and dependence on the Knave of Hearts is the only mitigating feature of her

imperious personality, and it is portrayed as a misguided, one-sided feeling. Perhaps the most

interesting feature of this film is the shift of focus from Alice’s size changes to her costume

changes. She wears a blue dress – unsurprising, given that this is a Disney production – but

unlike in the other versions, when her size changes, her clothing does not. Thus after her initial

sequence of falling and drinking from the “Drink Me” bottle, she ends up dressed in what were

before her underclothes, and, going along with a few further size changes, has three more

costume changes, all of which are given more attention than her actual size. For an adult Alice,

the modesty of her changing body is seemingly more important than the body itself; or, for a 3D

moviegoer, the rendering of fabrics is more visually interesting than allowing her to wear the

same dress throughout the movie. In conjunction with the focus on the romantic subplots,

Wonderland loses some of its childish connotations; characters who were nonsensical in

Disney’s version claim to be mad still but portray an adult depth of emotion as well as entirely

un-humorous stakes in a clearly deadly political standoff. One scene features Alice breaking into

the Red Queen’s palace by jumping over the moat on the heads of decapitated dissenters.

In any and all cases, the changes of adaptation are most visible in terms of Alice herself. She

is changed from the prudish, confused, occasionally violent child in Carroll’s tale to a tamer,

more palatable version of herself. Wonderland and Alice are no longer one entity, they enter into

opposition. Alice becomes the straight man Disney pushed her into being, and Wonderland and

its inhabitants takes on all the chaotic, destructive elements originally found within the

protagonist of the text. This is a more normative reading than Carroll perhaps indicated: in the

original text, Alice has been told to be disciplined but she does not succeed at enacting

discipline. In adaptation, she is a much clearer example of discipline for other children and

women to emulate. She is certainly also a more self-aware version, at least by modern standards

of self-awareness: Alice has a fear or a challenge to overcome, and so too she interacts with a

cast of characters who are significantly less mad and significantly more capable of providing life

wisdom as well as relevance to the story beyond their single chapter appearances in the original.

Perhaps the key here is continuity – allowing characters more movement between scenes, where

in Alice’s Adventures, they were largely only present in their own particular chapter and perhaps

the trial scene at the end of the book, and in Through the Looking-Glass, they were essentially

limited to their one-chapter appearances. Thus, in new imaginings, Alice is not quite so alone;

thus, Wonderland is more dynamic than a series of sets. In order to contain an appropriate

narrative arc, the characteristic vignette style of the original books and the opacity both of

Alice’s character and motivation as a little girl who cannot see beyond her schooling into

understanding the nonsense she is confronted with must be altered; characters cannot simply be

mad and Alice must be analyzable.

As I have demonstrated, commercial film adaptations of Alice abide by certain standards of

plot convention and character development. In order to fit these standards, Alice has had to grow

and change with the times, sometimes literally into being an adult character. Even when she is

portrayed as a child, however, she is held to a standard of behavior Carroll did not endorse or

represent. She is consistently good and unambiguous; there is nothing in her that would be

capable of creating the Queen of Hearts, and yet, that is exactly what she does in dreams. At least

partially, this can be explained by trends in understanding childhood. Valerie Walkerdine’s

analysis shows that “a playful and assertive girl may be understood as forward, uppity, over-

mature, too precocious” (Walkerdine 256). Perhaps ‘playful’ would always have been the wrong

word to describe Alice, but over-mature and precocious are certainly apt. If these traits are no

longer desirable in a female child portrayed through mass media, it certainly explains why Alice

must either become bland, grow up or both in later versions of Carroll’s source text. Likewise,

with the wealth of scholarship surrounding Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell, the source

material as well becomes interpreted as intrinsically adult. Jacqueline S. Rose argues out of the

rumors of pedophilia surrounding both Alice and Peter Pan that the prospect of writing a

children’s story is a fundamental impossibility. “This is to describe children’s fiction, quite

deliberately, as something of a soliciting” (Rose 59) is how she begins her section on Alice,

highlighting the notion that all children’s literature, and by extension, film intended for children,

is made by adults imagining what could appeal to a child enough for them to pay attention. In

that case, it is not the child reading or watching Alice who has changed in the interim years,

necessarily, but rather it is the imagination adults have of that child, and it would appear that

over the years, the imagining of that child has decreased in complexity, while the fear of the

dangers she may face in an unfamiliar set of circumstance has increased exponentially.

While it can reasonably be stated that the larger network of cultural understanding of

childhood remains on a subconscious level for most producers of Alice adaptations, it is not only

the advancement of plot that drives adaptation. Ulterior motives of the adaptors are often part

and parcel of the adaptation. Carolyn Sigler already notes this in her chapter on topical parodies

of Alice, many of which featured sections of political ‘whimsy’ such as the Downing Street

“ineptitude” (Sigler 332). As time progressed and different artistic and cultural trends took place,

the faces Alice took also varied. The “satirical use of Alice continued far beyond the end of

World War II” (Brooker 78), Dali painted an Alice-inspired series in 1969 (cf. Brooker 79), and

psychoanalytic interpretation favored the pedophilic interpretation of Carroll’s life and works. In

the 1960s, “psychedelic” (Brooker 81) interpretations came to the fore, leading to the summarily

rejected notion that Carroll was an opium addict. Currently, Alice is continually adapted and

readapted by divergent interpreters as seen in the above examples of films, television shows and

computer games, never appearing in quite the same guise but always claiming to be about the

same character. In Michael Hancher’s words, “the threatened disintegration of Alice’s personal

identity in Wonderland prefigures her actual dispersal, and renewal, among her audiences”

(Hancher 202). The argument here is that because Alice’s identity, or lack thereof, is what is at

stake in her travails through Wonderland (her changing size, her constant confusion as to who

she is, what she actually knows and what she misremembers), her identity becomes so unfocused

to her audience that she can take on any guise.

Perhaps it is her very unmooredness which gives Alice flexibility as a text and as an icon.

She has been interpreted as an adult, as a feminist, as a victim and as a destroyer of worlds,

though all the source text claims to represent is an ordinary Victorian child. It is notable that

when the interpreter is interested in Victorian times, Alice becomes the purest representation of

all things Victorian; when he or she is interested in something else, Alice becomes simply a

“universal” child. Even her femininity is occasionally eradicated in interpretation, when she

stands in as this “universal” child. In other cases, when the focus of adaptations draws strongly

on Carroll’s perceived relationship with Alice Liddell, it becomes a focal point. When she is

interpreted an adult woman, she must abide by the rules of adult women in modern society and

be neither as spoiled nor as petulant as her 1865 self was. The success of an Alice adaptation

hangs on how important or unimportant her origins are to both the creator of the adaptation and

the audience for that adaptation. Characters, themes and quotes from Alice have a way of seeping

into popular culture the way poetry and reference from Victorian times seep into Alice: such

allusions may be read as intentional, harmless whimsy to casual readers who are not in the know

and sly asides to a reader-in-the-know. This latter group, fans of Alice in original and adaptation,

now form an important part in understanding who Alice has become today and why she is still

relevant. Over the course of the next chapter, reader and viewer preferences about and opinions

on the adaptations discussed in this section will be analyzed through the medium of fan cultures

on the internet.

5. “She, Too, Began Dreaming After A Fashion”

5.1 Alice

Fans Describe Themselves

In the previous chapters, I have asked how. How did Alice come into being, what were the

historical factors that influenced the kind of childhood described in the text? How did Alice and

Lewis Carroll relate to that childhood? What about this text and its origin either in relation to

folklore or fairy tale traditions has made it so susceptible to retelling, and how have those

retellings been enacted? How has the transition into visual media affected retelling and what

about Alice enables an easy step into visual as well as narrative realization in film? Some

portions of this analysis point to more deep-seated questions – why is it that fairy tale is a genre

more suited to retelling than others? Why does the connection between Carroll and pedophilia

strike such a chord with biographers and adapters alike? In this chapter, it is the ‘why’ question I

am interested in. Specifically, it is the question of why do people care so much about Alice, about

whether or not Carroll was a pedophile, about which adaptation is a faithful one? In order to

tackle this question, I conducted a survey with online fans of Alice whom I found through the

blogging site Tumblr. I chose fans using this medium due to the high collaboration of fans on

Tumblr, which is a very interactive site. These fans also engage with Alice as an adapted and

adaptable source, unlike a book club or a purely Carroll-based fan group might; the Alice fans I

surveyed interact with multiple versions of the story daily. In the survey, I ask them to describe

both their media intake and relationship with that media, as well as why they personally are

interested in Alice. While this survey may not fully answer why anyone should care about Alice

to adapt or retell Carroll’s story or even fully explain why those who care do, it does offer a

After Alice wakes up from her dream about Wonderland, she describes it to her sister, who

drifts into a daydream in which she imagines Alice maintaining her sense of whimsy as an adult

(Carroll 131)

window into what makes Alice remain relevant to ordinary readers, and what fans today, looking

back at the century and a half of material about, based on or referencing Alice, believe to be

important. These fans provide the other side of the coin for the adapters of Alice in film. Where

in chapter four, I argued that adapters are inevitably interpreters, these fans, who are primarily

readers, all describe themselves as writers. This means that Alice fans on Tumblr are both

interpreters and adapters, both of Carroll’s book and of the subsequent adapted works based on

it. Seeking out fans’ own estimation of why they prefer one work over another and what the

stakes in analyzing Alice’s origins are may not provide conclusive answers, but it does provide a

context for Alice’s continued popularity.

The survey I conducted with these fans was built around a set of questions with the intent of

gathering a qualitative response to what motivates their readerly interest in Alice. In total, I

gathered responses from 14 Alice fans, most of whom are Americans. Some questions were

multiple choice, but most required written responses. The majority of my survey results were

created by submitting the link to the a blog author going by the name “Phantomwise” on tumblr,

who takes submissions from readers and posted a link to my survey publicly. I received ten

responses from this alone. The other responses I gathered were derived from sending messages

other Carrollian bloggers and, in a few cases, leaving reviews on transformative works based on

various Alice material. In terms of demographics, my survey respondents were fairly conform to

the general demographics of Tumblr. The majority of the participants are in their early twenties,

with only three below the age of nineteen and three above the age of twenty-five. All except one

identify themselves as female, and most (eight) are students. Only one lists their occupation as a

“Lewis Carroll Scholar” (Respondent 9). All respondents but one view themselves as writers; all

of them regularly read both books and online content as well as consume movies and TV.

Notably, many of them consume these media via the internet both in the form of online content

and by streaming television and/or movies online; the computer they use to create output is thus

also their main source of input.

In terms of which adaptations survey respondents are familiar with, a few trends are evident.

For one, many of the responses were limited to more recent adaptations or adaptations created by

major networks or production houses, indicating that these readers consume primarily popular

media. When listing the versions with which they were familiar, eleven out of fourteen survey

respondents included the 1951 Disney animated musical. Seven cite it as their first exposure to

the Alice story; four more can’t remember if it was the movie or the original books. Four cite it

as one of their favorite (if not their only favorite) versions of the Alice story. By contrast, nine

participants include the original books as the “original version” (Respondent 12) in the list of

versions they are familiar with, while six claim it as one of their favorites. It is curious that a

majority of participants would think of the original books only as a version of the Alice narrative,

curiouser still, to quote Alice herself, that fewer of them recall the books as their first exposure

but more of them list it as a favorite. Of those that list Disney’s version as a favorite, two do so

primarily because of “loyalty” to it as their first introduction to Carroll’s tale. As for awareness

of other adaptations, the most widely known by far are Willing’s 1999 version, which seven out

of fourteen respondents have seen; his 2009 version, which seven out of fourteen have seen; and

Tim Burton’s 2010 film, which twelve out of fourteen cite as important. Additionally, Frank

Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars are mentioned by five respondents, while American McGee’s

Alice in Wonderland, is mentioned by six respondents. Finally, Once Upon A Time in

Wonderland is mentioned by five respondents, though most of them add that they haven’t seen it,

only heard of it, and only one lists it as a favorite retelling. While further accounts of versions of

Alice provided by survey respondents are manifold, these were the only ones I found to achieve

something approaching a consensus.

What these responses indicate is that an idea of two origins of Alice is maintained by many

fans. Disney’s Alice and the original books are in one way or another presented as important

source texts by all respondents, and they both form an “originary” point of access. Despite the

fairytale connection of the Alice text, making it appear more a part of public property than many

books

, most survey respondents describe their relationship to the original book as akin to

viewing an art artifact rather than as the basis of a nostalgic childhood memory. Only four

participants think it might have been the first version they were exposed to, though they are not

positive, as it could have been the Disney movie as well. When explaining why it is nonetheless

a favorite, most respondents praise Carroll’s writing on a stylistic level, “the depth of

storytelling, wit, prose” rather than on the level of personal relevance to their lives (Respondent

6).

By contrast, when describing why Disney’s 1951 animated film is a favorite, respondents

praise Disney’s animation and the nostalgic childhood value of the film. For Disney’s version,

eleven participants are fairly certain it was the first version they saw; the affective connection to

the film version is based more on factors such as it being “the first one I was introduced to so it

still stayed with me the most” (Respondent 5). Nostalgia becomes a favorite explanation for

enjoyment of the Disney movie more than an attempt at establishing the movie’s objective

quality. In essence, the factor of being introduced to Alice through Disney is what makes it a

In terms of copyright law, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been in the public domain

since 1907, while Through the Looking-Glass has been since 1948. Tenniel’s illustrations have

been available since 1964. The real difference between the way any other book is perceived and

Alice is authorship. With fairy tales, authorship is often ignored, with Alice, authorship is

tantamount, but the wealth of retelling allows for a sense of public property

favorite. Thus, for this respondent, and others who state similar emotional attachments to the

Disney movie, it is an origin which to them is the most compelling. Carroll’s book may have

been the precedent historically, but to these respondents, in terms of their own relation to Alice, it

came later.

One respondent lists both the books and the movie as personal favorites. She is

“particular” to the books and enjoys “the vernacular”, but when speaking about the movie she

says “her loyalty and preference” is to the Disney version because “it has literally shaped who I

am today” (Respondent 8). The depth of connection to the movie is clearly much stronger for

this individual, and while she values the books as sharing in her conception of the original, she

remembers them more as an afterthought to her first encounter. In fact, she continues, “it’s great

fun to enjoy it as if you were a child” (Respondent 8), indicating that while the Disney movie has

nostalgic value and a direct tie to her childhood, the original books she values on a less personal

level and can only imagine what it would feel like to have such a formative connection with

them. This layer of only being able to enjoy Alice by imagining oneself as a child when one is an

adult reader is important. Alice is a book that children can’t quite grasp yet but adults can

appreciate because it reminds them of a childhood they might never have experienced – the

idyllic, fanciful notion of Victorian childhood presented in modern adaptations of Alice.

Furthermore, adult respondents demonstrate a grasp of the nuance embedded in Alice after years

of interpretation and adaptation; perhaps this particular reader is really simply implying that to

truly enjoy Alice one must let the nuance go, or read ‘like a child’ once more. Given that most of

the respondents are in their early twenties and childhood is not as far behind for them as

nostalgia would imply, it seems the fondness for Alice has to do more with a larger value being

given childhood and the memory thereof rather than the concrete childhoods experienced by

these respondents.

Especially with “children’s” stories – recall, there is a certain ambiguity to the propriety

and indeed intention of any and all versions of such narratives for a child audience – nostalgic

value seems to be key in their continued appeal to adults. On the level of marketing, this is

certainly part of why “grown-up” Alices, e.g. SyFy’s Alice (2009), Burton’s Alice in Wonderland

(2010), ABC’s Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (2013)

, inevitably feature stock references to

the original text, ranging from costume design for the Alice character and cameo appearances of

characters from the original. This tendency stretches to fragments of dialogue or poetry

resituated within the text. Some references are obvious to even a casual viewer of Disney’s film

looking to spot such allusions in these adaptations, and some are obscure enough that only a true

devotee could spot them. Nonetheless, all these references are spotted by someone, usually a fan,

and meticulously recorded both on personal blogs and on shared platforms such as Wikipedia,

allowing wider audiences to find and enjoy Alice’s influence. Nostalgic value is what inspires all

these references and adaptations; the presence of the familiar seems to inspire a curiosity in fans

to discover what has been changed even as they celebrate continuities.

Respondent 11 states, almost casually, that she feels that Alice has “visually influenced”

(Respondent 11) her more than anything, a very odd thing to say of a written narrative, but a less

odd thing to say when one observes which versions are actually known to the survey

respondents. Only one of the stories within Carolyn Sigler’s anthology of Alice-related writings

produced between 1865 and 1933 (Uncle Wiggly in Wonderland) is remembered by a survey

respondent, however twenty-five film versions are listed cumulatively in the survey, as well as a

see Appendix B Fig. 1

number of other works using visual means over literary (e.g. webcomics, American McGee’s

computer game. Only five out of fourteen survey respondents even knew of the same literary

adaptation, Frank Beddors Looking Glass Wars, a 2004 young adult trilogy. This is certainly

closer to popular culture than some of the more “highbrow” literary adaptations Sigler mentions

which were released after the 1930s; Beddor’s work was also released six years after her book.

However, it is also the only literary adaptation mentioned by more than one survey respondent;

by contrast, all of them mention several film adaptations, and most of the films are mentioned by

at least two survey respondents, often more. Film, specifically recent, commercially produced

film, clearly dominates the imagined response of internet fan communities at least in terms of my

own research.

Perhaps, to a young audience in the 21

century, the medium of film is more

approachable than literature. Then again, fan culture may also reflect Alice’s inherently visual

nature, from the Tenniel drawings onward. It seems the works known by Alice fans reflect a

broader trend towards visual culture. It is just not that they are uninterested in reading or literary

material, it is that the material which engages with Alice on the level of entertainment is no

longer released in print form. More recent books to do with Alice tend to be academic, still others

veer toward the experimental side of adult literature, engaging more thoroughly with the

pedophilia angle than with the representation of childhood

. Fans who come to Alice via the

Disney movie, as most of these do, seem to be searching for works trying to recapture the

whimsy and playfulness they see as intrinsic to Alice. Literature is no longer a medium in which

‘recapturing’ is a sought-after trait – literary retellings are deemed derivative rather than valuable

in terms of nostalgia, while the same is not yet true in the world of film.

For example, Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me, a fictionalized Carroll biography

These respondents do not only react to Alice through the quantifiable lens of which

adaptations they know and whether or not they like them. One of the questions I also chose to

ask was what role Alice plays in their lives. The answers they gave here were strikingly varied.

“It helped me discover myself, and it has proved to ground me when I find myself feeling lost in

life” (Respondent 7) is perhaps the most intense of these declarations of personal connection

with Alice in all her permutations, but it is a sentiment echoed both on the blogs and by the other

survey respondents. Almost all of them state a connection between their personal lives and Alice,

while also indicating a preference for at least two or more versions of it. Alice, to them, is not

static. The title “Alice in Wonderland” automatically refers to a multitude of works. Most of the

participants also create their own new content based on Alice in one way or another. When asked

what draws them to retellings, survey respondents answered both as producers and consumers,

indicating what qualities they like in a retelling as well as why they thought society as a whole

would like these qualities. The answers were largely variations on a theme: “we like to use

symbols and characters that are familiar and thus can be recognized and understood quickly by

our audience” (Respondent 11). Particularly Alice retellings “often come up when people feel out

of place” (Respondent 13), how Alice herself feels for a majority of the books. In some cases, the

point of interest for the respondent was “see[ing] the different points stressed in different

adaptation” (Respondent 5), or the simultaneous pleasure caused by nostalgic recognition of a

theme and setting without the comfort and loss of tension provided by complete familiarity.

Naturally, this is not the only motivation. To some respondents, retelling is also a good

way to “bring attention to the original” (Respondent 2) or even just “for profit” (Respondent 4)

when referring to commercially produced adaptations. This shows that these respondents have a

certain overview of market forces; they are all participants in online communities, and involved

at least in some way in the transmission of fan content or of retellings, both in image and word.

Quite a few of the respondents who are deeply involved in bringing attention to the original and

the “true” circumstances of its conception say they are important to them by virtue of their

blogging community. However, even these more cynical responses evaluating the world outside

the fan community eventually return to “the desire to see if we can make our favourite story into

our own creation” (Respondent 4). As discussed above, most of the respondents do not limit

themselves to mentioning only one adaptation; nor do they seem to believe there is a right or

wrong way to adapt, artistically – “dark Alice”

, meaning adaptations of Alice in which either

she or Wonderland become overtly threatening and often psychologically as well as physically

dangerous, is a preference some respondents do not personally enjoy, but do not ban entirely. It

seems their main stake is not entirely in the way the material is adapted, it is in the heart of the

matter. It is important to them that the drive to adapt Alice comes from a place of admiration and

enjoyment of the source material. In a word, it is important to them that the people adapting

Alice are to some extent fans themselves, or at least have an understanding of fandom to the

point that they will include the correct symbols and tropes, even if it is a for-profit adaptation.

5.2 The “Carrollians”: Consumers, Producers, and Interpretive Community

My main site of observing fans of Alice was on the interactive blogging site Tumblr.

Here, users create their own blogs in which they can upload and post materials they have created

themselves, i.e. still images or gifs (moving images) from various film and theater adaptations as

well as illustrations, quotes and other material surrounding Alice. Furthermore, they can “reblog”

from one another, meaning if one Tumblr user follows another, that user’s posts will appear on

the first user’s newsfeed and they can post that users content on their own blog. Reblogs contain

Especially American McGee’s Alice (2000)

information both on the original source of the post and the person it has been reblogged from; it

is widely considered extremely bad manners on Tumblr to erase the source notation. This

contrasts to other blogging platforms (e.g. other blogging sites or an independently owned

websites) in a number of ways. For one, creating a Tumblr is a quick and easy process, it takes

perhaps a minute and requires only an email address and a username, where other sites might

require more personal information. Creating a Tumblr automatically makes the user part of the

community: the homescreen for a Tumblr blog is the dashboard, which records the activity of all

other users being followed. Through tagging and Tumblr’s search function, it is easy to find

other users who run blogs with similar interests. In essence, Tumblr offers easy access and high

community involvement to users. Other blogging sites do not always have these options, though

some do

. Promoting one’s own blog is one’s own responsibility – searching for material is not

as easy as it is on Tumblr. Likewise, many other sites require advertising. Alice enthusiasts who

have their own websites must pay for hosting as well as design their own layout. Tumblr is the

most accessible form of blogging as it requires less expertise and commitment, and immediately

connects to other fans. There are limits, of course – unlike a forum website, on which

conversations between users are presented in a thread, on Tumblr, conversations are private

unless users choose to publish them. This means that the main ways I could observe this

community was through what they posted, what they reblogged from each other and what they

said about each other on public posts. Additionally, I have no way of verifying the information

given to me by the bloggers I observed as I only interacted with them via Tumblr and via the

survey.

Alternatives include blogspot, livejournal or buying a webpage domain. The former two offer

less networking abilities than tumblr, as they don’t have the option to reblog other users’ content.

The latter involves both the financial investment and the technical knowhow of creating an

individual site.

Discovering online communities is not necessarily a straightforward task. Samuel Wilson

and Leighton Peterson discuss this in their article “The Anthropology of Online Communities”

(2002), mentioning that community as a whole “seems to imply a false circumscription and

coherence” (Wilson 455) as no individual belongs to only one community. This is compounded

in internet communities, as “a debate has continued about whether online, virtual, or otherwise

computer-mediated communities are real or imagined” (Wilson 456). The difficulty is that it is

very hard to establish shared practices, beliefs or even contact between alleged members of a

community when said community exists only virtually. On the other hand, these communities

can be seen as “speech communities” (Wilson 459), sharing similar patterns of communication

despite differing backgrounds. Myc Wiatrowski, in his article “The Dynamics of Fandom”, picks

this argument up a decade after Wilson and Peterson engage with the earlier formations of online

communities to discuss the relationship between fans and producers as well as the relationship

between fans and their urtext. Internet community formation, by virtue of its newness, is not a

terribly well-documented phenomenon

in academic research. It is even more ill-defined than

many other forms of community simply because there is no face-to-face component and

knowledge about the participants beyond their self-stated interest in the community is not readily

accessible. Additionally, as Stephen R. Thompson points out in “Ethnomethodology and the

Study of Online Communities”, “online communities present the researcher with nothing but

text” (Thompson 11). Following the groundwork laid by these thinkers, over the course of this

subchapter I will discuss the text provided by the blog authors I studied, as well as examine how

exactly their community, such as it is, is documented.

Except, that is, on the internet itself, where most pages can be tracked down even years after

their deletion.

Two of the main blogs I followed throughout the duration of this project were “all-in-the-

golden-afternoon96.tumblr.com” and “still-she-haunts-me-phantomwise.tumblr.com”

. Golden

Afternoon is a fairly new blogger who has joined the group of Carroll enthusiasts started by

Phantomwise. Golden Afternoon’s blog is a personal one which focuses for the most part on

Alice, with all non-Carroll-related posts being tagged “non Carroll post”, and a lot of her Carroll

material is reblogged from Phantomwise. This means that “all-in-the-golden-

afternoon96@tumblr.com” is the only blog Golden Afternoon runs and it contains personal

information and things of personal interest to her as well as Carroll material. Phantomwise’s blog

is not a personal one – it is a blog run by a user who has multiple blogs, and this one is dedicated

specifically to Carroll material. Phantomwise is a well-established Carroll blogger, being one of

the most-reblogged and easiest to find through Tumblr’s search function (this being how I found

these users in the first place). She is also the instigator of the group of Carroll enthusiasts I

focused on in my research, which will be elaborated on later.

One of the main markers of the style of content creation among this group is that it is

highly collaborative; users are in constant contact with one another indirectly via reblogging

each others’ posts and seeing who reblogs their own. They also communicate via submissions;

Phantomwise accepts submissions and posts them, while all tumblr users have an askbox, in

which followers can submit questions and comments. This can be done anonymously or from a

different blog. These two blogs frequently make use of each others’ material; additionally,

Golden Afternoon lists other recommended blogs on her Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

page. A major characteristic of the blogs is that authorship becomes very fluid, as users share

material and republish it, implying that they allow another users’ words or content to talk

These users will hereafter be referred to as “Golden Afternoon” and “Phantomwise”. Both

state their preference to not reveal their real names in the “about me” sections of their blogs.

through them, as well as releasing their own opinions and content to be shared, commented upon

and altered by other users.

I observed these blogs by becoming a tumblr user myself and following them. I found

them via the search function, and later, by tracking the tag “Carrollian”. My actual interaction

with them was limited; their posts appeared on my dashboard, enabling me to like or reblog

them, and some of them chose to follow me in return, which gave them the same ability. This

means that my observation of the blogs is limited to their public posts as well as their survey

responses; their private messages with each other, which one can surmise exist based on some of

their public posts about each other, remain a mystery.

Phantomwise’s blog has a note on the front page saying that the blog proprietor is a

supporter of Karoline Leach’s biographical position on the vexed question of Carroll’s interest in

children. Leach portrays Carroll as having meaningful relationships with adult women and

rejects the belief that Carroll was a pedophile. The author spends a good deal of time refuting

people who believe the book has anything to do with an unhealthy interest on Carroll’s part

either in Alice Liddell or Alice of the books, posting scholarly work to “prove” the contrary, and

showing excerpts from Carroll’s other writings and work frequently, to demonstrate this thesis.

The username “still she haunts me, phantomwise”, however, stems from the closing poem at the

end of Through the Looking Glass. The full stanza is,

Still she haunts me, phantomwise

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes

(Carroll 287)

Not only is it unclear as to which Alice is being spoken of in this poem, referencing the “sunny

sky” (Carroll 287) of the afternoon on which Carroll told the story, but also the role Alice takes

is not exactly as unambiguous as the blog author frequently states it is. Rather, Alice is said to be

“haunting”, the poem’s speaker is unable to forget her. She is “never seen by waking eyes”, and

yet he is unable to let go of her image. This would seem to indicate that at least textually,

Carroll’s relationship with Alice was somewhat fraught, obsessive even. One could surmise that

choosing this particular quote as a username, even when consistently believing in, even

“championing” Carroll’s innocence and the simplicity of his works, is an acknowledgment of the

complexity of the issue. While the content of the blog denies the ambiguity, the blog itself is still

nourished by the controversy surrounding Lewis Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell.

Many of the blogs I am focusing on in this project openly distrust academia as they claim

the text and its author is innocent of the underlying darkness attributed them, even as there is a

countering aspiration towards academic inquiry. Blog users collect Alice material, photograph it

and share their trophies amongst each other, celebrating each others’ collections, as well as

avidly collecting secondary material such as biographies. They also cite academic arguments and

rephrase them into their own more personal emotional language. For instance, when discussing

Morton Cohen’s claim that Carroll had wanted to marry Alice Liddell, Phantomwise states that

she is “shocked that he said such misleading things and no one corrected him” (“Then Guiliano

upped…”). She goes on to discuss at great length the same primary sources Cohen is citing (the

letters exchanged between Alice Liddell and Carroll), and offers a number of other

interpretations, both citing other scholars and being clear in the matter that there may be a variety

of valid interpretations of this material. Phantomwise is “shocked” by Cohen’s conclusions, and

because she is running a blog and not writing an academic rebuttal, can subtitle a section of her

argument “Again, Cohen Reads What He Wants” (“Then, Guiliano upped…”). On the one hand,

this reveals the strong emotional attachment of this particular blogger to Carroll’s life and works,

and no hesitation in expressing her thoughts on published works. On the other, the caustic,

cynical tone she takes towards Cohen’s thesis is one major difference between the work

Phantomwise does and that of a more traditional academic.

Such posts reveal a set of deeply personally held beliefs about academic work on

Phantomwise’s part. In a post in which the center of focus is not the veracity of the claims about

Carroll, but rather the academic trends she has noted in her extensive research on the subject,

Phantomwise announces her own “goal of educating people on Lewis Carroll” (“In my goal…”).

This post is largely disparaging of laypeople’s, but also academics’, tendency to take secondary

literature at face value as opposed to examining Carroll’s letters and diaries themselves.

Particularly Morton Cohen comes under fire frequently, as his autobiography of Carroll is “seen

by the Old Guard Carrollians as the definite and the last word” (“In my goal…”). This is an

attitude Phantomwise displays towards Cohen’s biography frequently; as Leach’s research

accords with her point of view as a more accurate portrayal of Carroll’s life by explaining the

missing parts in early Carroll biographies as an attempt on the part of Victorian relatives to

disguise his close relationships with adult women, none of whom he was married to. Cohen’s

method is not at issue in this particular post, as Phantomwise especially points out that the

biographer takes all of his material from primary sources, all of which are available to other

interested parties as well. Even those who oppose Cohen cite him rather than the primary

sources, despite Cohen’s “extraordinary habit of saying sources support his arguments when on

closer examination, they don’t” (“In my goal…”). It is this latter tendency which concerns

Phantomwise – the fact that interested parties don’t empower themselves by using the same

research methods as Cohen, as Leach, as Phantomwise herself, and come to their own

conclusions (ideally, the same conclusions Phantomwise came to).

As a part of this quasi-scholarly interest hiding its close relationship to the format of

scholarly work, Phantomwise herself cites all her sources at the bottom of each post, as well as

mentioning these sources in each case which demands it. As a matter of fact, Phantomwise has a

post dedicated to showing users how to cite her blog in academic work. She offers citations in

multiple styles and notes that she is always happy to contribute to research on Alice. She also

notes that those interested in working on Carroll or Alice ought to use the material Phantomwise

herself cites, as it is probably “more academically reliable than a tumblr blog” (“Can I Cite

You?”). She adds that she is happy to contribute by explaining where she got her material.

Nonetheless, Phantomwise describes herself as merely a “really, really dedicated fan that

did a lot of research and spouts out useless trivia” (“Who Are You?”) as opposed to an expert. In

a way, this rejection of expertise is typical of fan groups in general; in Myc Wiatrowski’s “The

Dynamics of Fandom”, he outlines the frequent consumer-producer tension present in fan

communities. According to him, “fans use the text to create new cultural production”

(Wiatrowski) in “the battle for hegemonic control of the urtext in consumer-producer

relationships” (Wiatrowski). Wiatrowski is speaking of a very different fandom: fans of the TV

show Firefly, and its tie-in movie Serenity, whose urtext is more contained than Alice’s

sprawling history, as well as being significantly more recent. The Alice fandom has a less fraught

relationship with the market forces which created it, partially because the origin story of Alice is

so mythologized and partially because Disney’s family-friendly image has been maintained to a

certain degree by most fans. Wiatrowski describes fandom as creating itself through its

production of material within a community that is seen as “significantly different from the

mainstream norm” (Wiatrowski). In Phantomwise’s case, the rejection of such “mainstream

norm” is aimed at academic material rather than popular culture; in both cases, however, the

rejection of the more profitable or “legitimate” form of production, either commercial or

academic, serves to disguise the similarities between for-profit and fan producers.

Wiatrowski’s definition of fandom foregrounds “being significantly different from the

mainstream norm” (Wiatrowski). He clarifies that fans are fairly normalized in society at this

point, but that fan communities still embrace this othering as a defining feature. For

Phantomwise and Golden Afternoon, this is enacted by their self-descriptions as being “really,

really dedicated” (“Who Are You?”) or even “obsessive” (“Who in the World am I?”) in the case

of Golden Afternoon, but decidedly not experts. This method of constructing themselves as

interested parties with no further professional expertise than that provided by their own interest

masks the close relationship between the way they understand and research Alice and the

academic work from which they distance themselves . This construction of the self has the side

effect of hiding the large amounts of extremely specialized knowledge held by the Alice fan

community as well as the effort they put into producing quality material. This can be seen in

Phantomwise’s posts about Cohen in that she invests significant amounts of time and research

into finding original citations from Carroll’s diaries and letters, as well as citing multiple

biographers, in order to establish her opinion as valid. On an artistic level, some Carroll fans

create their own illustrations of the books

or edit still or moving frames from various

adaptations to show each adaptation to its best advantage. Fans maintain the pretense of a

consumer-producer dialectic when they have become both themselves. This is compounded by

the fact that for fans among the blogger community, laptops and computers are the site both for

producing content and for consuming films and games, meaning that both activities become in a

sense part of the experience of “being online” as an Alice fan.

See Appendix A, Fig. 22

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Golden Afternoon, who works most closely with Phantomwise (the two users frequently

support each other’s arguments and reblog each others’ material, as well as refer to each other in

posts, although Golden Afternoon defers to Phantomwise as an instigator of the group to which

they belong), includes less academic citations, yet her FAQ is almost entirely dedicated to

Carroll sources rather than information about Alice. She, too, includes a note in the blurb on the

front page of her blog to indicate that she supports Karoline Leach’s position as a biographer.

“lewis-carroll.tumblr.com”, another user supported as a “Carrollian” according to Golden

Afternoon’s FAQ, has a far more limited “Questions” section than either Phantomwise or Golden

Afternoon, being a smaller blog; this user seems more interested in the mathematical aspect of

Alice than anything else

. While he or she, too, rejects the notion that Carroll was a pedophile,

“lewis-carroll.tumblr.com” states that Carroll “liked little girls at a level that was more than

normal” (“Ask Me”) – closer to an admission of abnormality in Carroll’s life and behavior than

any of the other users come. This blog is less focused on Carroll and more on Alice as a visual

phenomenon; however, it too reveals an indexical, theoretical approach to adaptation – there is a

complex tagging system which helps users navigate between every version of Alice. This

catalogue includes Tim Burton’s 2010 film and American McGee’s computer game, versions

which many of this particular group of users avoid as being too dark, too far from the source

material, or lacking in appropriately respectful affection for the subject material.

This group of tumblr users have created their own tag. On tumblr, tags serve to organize

material in specific ways. Thus, a tag can be searched, in this case “Carrollian”, revealing all

Carroll’s work as a mathematician has also been taken as an interpretive basis for a variety of

the jokes in Alice; I have chosen not to interact with this aspect of analysis as it rarely enters

popular film or discussion of the books and is largely relegated to specialist knowledge.

Phantomwise notes that Tim Burton “has said in interviews he never connected with the story”

(“Why don’t you post Tim Burton’s Alice?”); this is a major ground for disliking the adaptation.

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material posted with that tag. Users can also blacklist tags so they don’t have to see them. Tags

are not only a method of organizing content, however, they also are a place for blog authors to

explain their feelings on a subject outside of the post itself. They may comment on images or

citations here frequently without interfering with the integrity of the post – unless they feel the

post needs a more visible commentary. The tag is a metatextual tool allowing users to organize

their own material, search other users, and provide annotation without intruding on the content of

a post. The “Carrollian” tag, when searched, reveals a fairly specific collection of Alice in

Wonderland material.

Phantomwise, when explaining her reasons for creating the tag, says that the “Alice in

Wonderland” tag was “a mess” (“The Carrollian Tag”), as it contained too broad a spectrum of

material which frequently didn’t represent Alice or Carroll the way Phantomwise feels they

ought to be shown. The “Carrollian” tag is intended to mark material related specifically to Alice

or Carroll. She makes sure to explain that simply because she herself does not post material from

certain adaptations (notably Tim Burton and American McGee’s computer game) does not mean

that doing so is off limits, pointing to the fact that “lewis-carroll.tumblr.com” posts on both

subjects frequently and can still use the “Carrollian” tag in doing so. In terms of usage,

Phantomwise notes that the tag is not “some sort of elitist club” (“The Carrollian Tag”),

indicating that any user interested in posting material can do so, and can use the tag. However,

there is to be “no nonsense about drugs, pedophilia, or portraying Alice in a disrespectful way”

(“The Carrollian Tag”). What constitutes a disrespectful way to treat Alice is left vague, perhaps

intentionally. This set of priorities reveals is that the author views the Alice fandom as a

community, stating an equality between all Alice enthusiasts by making sure to state that anyone

can use the tag, “Carrollian”. Of course, in order to use a tag, one must know it exists. Most

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Tumblr users who were raised in an English-speaking country will have heard the phrase “Alice

in Wonderland” and be able to tag accordingly, while few of them will have developed the

specialized interest to find a blog author like Phantomwise and begin using the tag “Carrollian”,

limiting users of the tag. As one of the originators of the tag, Phantomwise also claims a sense of

propriety (or even authorship) over it in that there is a code of conduct she wants to instill,

namely an interpretation of Carroll and his works in line with her own and a lack of self-

promotion (cf. “The Carrollian Tag”) in favor of overall focus on spreading acceptable Alice

material.

The specificity of these community rules defines the Carrollians far more clearly than the

other (many) Alice bloggers on Tumblr. While Phantomwise’s remark that the “Alice in

Wonderland” tag is a mess is perhaps slightly caustic, it is not necessarily untrue: the “Alice in

Wonderland” tag is used frequently, being available to anyone who has even a passing interest in

the subject, used to reference media only barely related, such as the Jefferson Airplane song “Go

Ask Alice”, or signal personal experiences the user is relating to Alice. The top blogs listed as

using this tag are often populated by “dark Alice” fans, largely using material from graphic

novels and American McGee’s computer game. However, using the Carrollian tag requires

insider knowledge. This factored into my decision to analyze these bloggers in particular – their

community stood out amongst other Tumblr blogs devoted to Alice as they made a specific effort

as a group to distance themselves from the greater mass of Alice-related media. Phantomwise

and Golden Afternoon and, in fact, many of the Carrollians, have customized blog themes

(unlike many Alice blogs not a part of the Carrollian group), leading to easier visibility and

A blog layout designed by themselves or a third party, sometimes for money, rather than the

standard ones provided by the site. This allows for customization of the blog’s appearance more

so than the standard, free options for tumblr users.

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comprehension of the content of their blogs. Many of the users who blog about Alice who are not

Carrollians employ standard layouts in dark colors and are harder to follow visually. The

Carrollians are more interested in establishing indexical features, such as “Lewis-Carroll”’s

tagging system explained above. Phantomwise has a tendency to post content most frequently on

Wednesdays, leaving the other days of the week for answering questions, working on other blogs

and, presumably, her life outside of Alice fandom. There is a professionalism to this organized,

well-researched approach to blogging that sets these users apart, as well as their active efforts to

reach out to other members within their community.

In a way, the subset of the Alice fandom I examined allows only “safe” Carroll media,

and ostracizes “unsafe” users. There are certainly bloggers and fans who revel in the “dark

Alice” adaptations, but “Carrollian” users only touch on them tangentially, instead focusing on

them as a site of contradiction to what they view as the “real” meaning of the books. The form of

the Alice narratives is not as important as the content: all forms are accepted, photographed,

turned into gifs

and shared. While users may not like one iteration or another, they clearly

argue their case as to why not, and allow that the relative quality of an adaptation is a question of

individual taste and interpretation of the Alice books; for instance, Phantomwise refuses to post

images from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland because she feels it is “missing the point of the

books: not to have a story” (“Why Don’t You Post Tim Burton’s Alice”); even so, she does not

impose the same restriction on her Tumblr friends. As long as the rules of acceptable content are

maintained – Carroll was not a pedophile, plot is not a necessity – any form of Alice adaptation

or commentary is valid. Only when the purity of Carroll’s original is undermined do arguments

break out. In a way this blog displays a similar kind of purity dynamic towards Carroll the author

“Gifs” are moving images, sometimes with captions, colored and uploaded by users. The name

originates from the document suffix this type of data is saved as.

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as it does toward Alice. Carroll becomes associated with an icon of childhood, and thus must

remain undamaged. Alice, as we have seen, is rendered innocuous in most adaptations, which

insist on her purity and simplicity. Little attention is paid to her subconscious as the source of

Wonderland, while Wonderland itself is often foregrounded as a threat. In a way, this mirrors

Stanley Fish’s views on how interpretive communities are formed: “There is no single way of

reading that is correct or natural, only “ways of reading” that are extensions of community

perspectives” (Fish 16). This is very true of the way in which Carrollian bloggers assert the

structure of their community: they acknowledge a multiplicity of readings, but are very clear to

establish which of these are acceptable within the community.

As Wilson and Peterson state in “The Anthropology of Online Communities”, “a debate

has continued about whether online, virtual, or otherwise computer-mediated communities are

real or imagined” (Wilson 456). A case can be made for the Carrollian’s community to be

accepted as real, in that they make conscious, active efforts to explain what they themselves view

as the rules of their community. Especially as Wilson and Peterson go on to discuss the fact that

most individuals reside between several communities they are a part of, forming online groups

by means of “shared communicative competence and repertoires” (Wilson 459), the Carrollians

set themselves apart as a group with a vested interest in all iterations of Alice, as well-informed,

more-than-casual aficionados who often spend more time and energy on their research than some

of the sources they cite

. Their interest runs deep, involving both community ideals as well as

“correct” and “incorrect” ways to interpret the urtext, as well as deeply personal connections to

the material. The demands of these users are to abandon interpretation when it leads to

negativity, to maintain affection for the urtext of Alice and essentially to remain true to Carrolls’

At least in their estimation.

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desire for no didacticism to touch his text. Deep involvement with the text and with the norms

they want to uphold around its interpretation make Carrollians not only bonded by the collective

speech community formed through their specialization and interest, but also aligned with one

another on an ethical or moral level.

As we have seen, in Victorian times, the focus of critical reception of the Alice books was

on educating children and increasing the sense of whimsy in children’s literature, adapting to a

literary and artistic environment enamored with an ideal of innocent childhood, bloggers of the

century are reacting to an entirely new set of paradigms surrounding these ideas. Following

Disney and the commodification of childhood, as well as the explosion of critical theory on the

subject of child-rearing and psychoanalysis throughout both popular culture and academia,

leading to the perhaps unhealthy focus on pedophilia that critic James Kincaid points out, the

Carrollians seem to represent a form of cultural backlash. Over and over, they emphasize that the

real crux of Alice is a girl having a strange dream. The main cause for its creation was that

Carroll wanted to please a little girl he whom he had (platonically) befriended. In an almost

structuralist plea, the Carrollians are asking Carroll’s and his adaptors’ modern audiences to take

his work and his life as face value and not to become mired in the controversies (introduced

later) now surrounding them.

The sense of protectiveness of fans towards their hobbyhorse is by no means unique to the

Alice fan community. Already in 1992, Constance Penley noted this propensity in her article

studying Star Trek fan communities, “Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture". At the

time when this article was written, fans interacted by selling transformative works to each other

and mailing typewritten fanfiction to each other. Penley’s research in this much larger

community took place at Star Trek conventions and in person; she analyzed a phenomenon more

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recognizable as ‘popular culture’ than Alice. By contrast, many modern Carroll fans are far more

interested in academic discourse than the counterparts Penley discusses. They have been exposed

to the original Alice books almost as an art object. Their approach to the urtext they are interested

in is certainly reminiscent of Penley’s analysis, however, as their readings are based in the detail-

oriented knowledge of “the canon universe” (Penley 489); it is explicit in the Alice fandom that

core participants are expected to have a certain expert’s knowledge on Carroll’s biography and

writings, as well as a familiarity with the full breadth of merchandise and adaptations

surrounding the books. While some fanfiction authors who write for multiple audiences have

only a passing interest in one variation of Alice, the Carrollian bloggers, who create largely

image-based content and consume image, film and text relating to Alice have an in-depth

knowledge of all areas of Alice adaptation and interpretation.

Where Penley describes her informants as being proud of their accomplishments as writers

and artists, as well as fearing misrepresentation (cf. Penley 485), a similar, but slightly different

paradigm is true for Alice fans. They are proud of their own and each others’ still images and

gifs, as well as the collections of Alice materials they display through photography

. However,

their fear of misrepresentation is not necessarily directed towards themselves as interpreters and

producers. When I approached them and asked if they would take a survey, they were interested,

even enthusiastic, about the idea of an analysis of transformative works in relation to the Alice

fandom. Penley’s informants, by contrast, were worried she could not portray their interest

without intrinsically judging or othering them. Among Carrollians, the fear of misrepresentation

most frequently shown is the fear that Carroll’s life and works will be misinterpreted. Partially

One user has their own website dedicated to their collection of Alice works

(http://maayancd.wix.com/the-cheshire-cat

) which has been reblogged by many of the

Carrollians

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this could be because Penley’s informants were creating transformative works which radically

subverted the canonical urtext of Star Trek and were fairly sexually explicit. Carrollians, as has

been established, are very keen on maintaining the canon as they see it, unsubverted. The

positioning of themselves as conservators and crusaders for a misunderstood text gives

Carrollians more of a socially acceptable footing as fans, transferring the fear of

misrepresentation from themselves onto their too often misunderstood urtext.

This is not to say that Alice fans are perceived, or think they are perceived, as residing

entirely within the cultural mainstream. The intensity of their relationship with the text almost

prohibits this. Henry Jenkins’ description of the way fandom is perceived as “false worship” (cf.

Jenkins, Textual Poachers 15) has some grounding in the mode in which fans discuss their

urtext. For one, the collection of material comprising the urtext is commonly referred to as “the

canon” (Penley 489). Carrollians don’t necessarily use this term to describe anything beyond the

actual text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, yet I would

contend that the urtext of their fandom comprises both the fictional texts and the rest of Carroll’s

writings, his diaries, letters and the primary source material documenting his life. All of these

collected writings are treated similarly to a canon; they are the source of all knowledge on the

topic of Alice, and more than that, only they are the source of authority on the topic. This is true

for the case of Phantomwise and her repeated, impassioned pleas for Carroll enthusiasts to read

the primary sources themselves so they will not only be convinced of her position but understand

that it is the only position on Carroll’s life and work. This is also true for the Carrollian

Ravenwitch, who has a personal blog not dedicated to anything in particular, but heavily

featuring Carrollian material – she posts images of the Alice narrative from film and drawing, but

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the only secondary material on the subject to be found is analysis reblogged from her

compatriots. This is an intentionally closed, self-referential world.

The relationship between “Carrollians” and the material they are interested in is

essentially one of maintaining the text itself is the only valid source of invention and revision. At

the same time, this text has only one correct factual interpretation (a little girl has a strange

dream; Carroll was not a pedophile) though artistic reinterpretations can be formally varied as

long as they maintain the “correct” content. In essence, these Alice fans adhere to a

fundamentalist position: the original word of the author is the only authority acceptable. Where

Roland Barthes reveled in the literary texts’ “multiplicity” (Barthes 148) questioning the role of

authorship in deciding what a text might “mean”, “Carrollians” long for “a final signified, to

close the writing” (Barthes 147); they long for a knowable intent and a knowable author, not an

ill-defined space between the written and the read. Paradoxically, all of their energy and

imagination as producers of transformative works is directed toward shoring up a canonical

approach to both Alice and Lewis Carroll.

As I have shown, Alice comes into modernity in a number of ways. Strikingly, the book

enters popular consciousness most forcefully in film format, with fans growing attached

especially to the Disney version of the story before they reach for the original book. In doing so,

a transition or dialogue is created between image and linguistic text. Film serves as an

introductory medium, an artifact viewed for pleasure and while it is capable of being analyzed as

such, the primary interaction for Alice fans with film is one of nostalgic longing for one’s own

childhood. Interacting later with the book, however, it is not only the fans’ own childhood they

become nostalgic for, but rather the one they have seen portrayed in film over the years. The

book becomes more accessible the older the audience and the more the complex relationships

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among author, child reader and adult reader are understood. Engaging with Carroll’s text is

immediately situated within these structures, arguably tainting the nostalgia tied to the films.

Such tainting, I would argue, is what fans try to avoid through their repeated protestations of

Carroll’s innocence. Alice is defined by this particular interpretive community’s desire to see

mirrored its own concept of childhood. This is an imagined purity directly attributable to 20

century fantasies of Victorian childhood, but the interpretive community does not want to

acknowledge that. Instead, the “Carrollians” create a self-sustaining cycle in which Alice mirrors

childhood as they see it but is credited with defining childhood.

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Conclusion

Over the course of this project, I have examined the following question: Why do we still

care about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? By rights, a work containing so many references

to its contemporary context ought to appear dated to us now. By rights, it ought to seem entirely

unsuitable for children, who might not even understand the term “Victorian England”, let alone

oblique references to it in poetry. Nonetheless, here we are, a century and a half later, and Alice

is alive and well in popular consciousness. Carroll’s original book exists in literature, both in its

original form and in literary works retelling the story. It exists in film, both as “straight” book-to-

film adaptation and as transformation of the books into films intended for an adult audience.

Finally, exists in the context of fan communities as a continually relevant, continually reread and

reimagined phenomenon.

Alice achieves its mercurial status via a number of different avenues. Firstly, the

circumstances in which Carroll wrote Alice mean that the books originated at the beginning of

the tradition of children’s literature. This gives them status both as a formative part of that genre

as well as specificity to the historical circumstances of the Victorian era. Beyond the broad scope

of context, Alice is also a personal story, written by Carroll for Alice Liddell, beginning as a

fanciful story he told her off the top of his head. Both the time period and the circumstances of

the story’s first telling have become fictionalized in the interim 150 years, allowing Alice an

origin myth of sorts. I argue that it is this fictionalization of the circumstances surrounding the

text which mean it has become understood as an innately adaptable source, indeed, a source

which is more authentic in adaptation than in original.

The origins for Alice’s adaptability are only one side to the history thereof – the other

factor I have highlighted in causing the wealth of Alice material is the importance of visual

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culture. While in Carroll’s time, photography was a very new medium, one he himself was very

interested in, the 20

century meant a movement of popular audiences away from literature and

towards film. Given that Alice was, from the first handwritten edition Carroll gave Alice Liddell

for Christmas, always imbued with illustrations, this book in particular has been a rich source for

film adaptation. In my opinion, the most popularly influential of these film adaptations was

Disney’s 1951 Alice in Wonderland, and understanding how this film came into being helps to

understand how those that followed it were conceived of.

Nowadays, Alice is possibly more on the radar of popular consciousness than ever. With

more and more material based on Alice becoming available, and the internet providing a means

of connection for fans of any and all versions, interest communities surrounding Alice are no

longer confined to local Lewis Carroll book groups or academic circles. What these fans reveal

about Alice and the role it has played in their lives is that they use it as a depository for their

image of how childhood ought to be, and create a collective nostalgia for a phenomenon that

does not exist in reality based on how they interpret the text. These normative impulses are

visible in readings of the text conveyed by fan communities, and they are visible in the themes

and tropes guiding popular film adaptations of Alice in recent years.

While I am still unconvinced I can fully offer an answer to the question of why Alice is

still popular, given that some measure of the books’ success must lie in the unknowable of the

readers’ emotional reaction to it, over the course of this project I have reached the following

answer: Alice still matters, because by virtue of the unique circumstances surrounding the way

the book was created and the way these circumstances have been interpreted since then, the book

has become an icon for the idea of childhood to an adult audience. As the idea of childhood

changes, so, too, does the idea of the book, and so, too, do the guiding tropes of adaptation.

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Whether or not the book actually contains the notions of this (largely culturally constructed)

concept of childhood has become more or less irrelevant, because interpretive communities

believe they are seeing what is there rather than what they want to see. Similarly, the ‘child’ is

figured as a constant, unchanging idea which is represented by the text. Alice becomes caught in

the paradox in which the interpretation of the text is constantly changing precisely because no

one believes the idea of childhood it has come to represent is changing.

Reading Alice and reading the way it appears in popular media becomes something of a

gauge for how childhood is imagined and what values audiences (especially American

audiences) feel nostalgia for. Alice is not necessarily a mirror in the traditional sense; it is a

distorted mirror, bloating certain aspects of childhood and Victoriana in current estimation and

diminishing others. Alice, I believe, is where film directors, fans, and even casual readers turn to

see themselves through a looking-glass that shows them what they wish they looked like. But

Alice is by no means the only text with a rich history of adaptation; it is by no means the only

text with a striking and unique origin story. In fact, a variety of other texts with similar origins

and similar trajectories have come after it, such as Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. Nor is Alice

the only artifact of popular culture which is reformed in the readers’ mind – in a sense, this could

be said of all texts, and has been by thinkers such as Roland Barthes. In my opinion, especially in

context with similar discussions about other texts, Alice remains an important text in

understanding this phenomenon because of the dissonance surrounding what some readers want

to see in Alice and what other readers want to see Alice’s origins. In order to counteract these

inconsistencies, Alice fans become active agents in defining the content of their urtext. In

examining reader response, Alice could be an invaluable tool.

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Appendix A

Illustrations and visual portrayals of Alice

Fig. 1: Carroll’s handwritten version of the mouse’s tail/tale

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Fig. 2: Portrait of Alice in Frederick Rabbit’s house, too large to fit either the house, textually, or

the frame, visually. Her dark hair and serious expression are frequently noted as being different

than subsequent portrayals.

123

Fig. 3: Print version of the Mouse’s tail/tale

124

Fig. 4: Tenniel’s illustration style, more intricate and using more shading than Carroll’s style.

Integrated into the text in many spaces, and though some images have frames, many do not,

allowing for a seamless transition between text and image.

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Fig. 5: The tenth chapter of Through the Looking Glass Nina Auerbach speaks about, more

heavily image than content.

126

Fig. 6: The eleventh chapter of Through the Looking-Glass

127

Fig. 7: Carroll’s original handwritten manuscript, with illustration of Alice meeting the

caterpillar

128

Fig. 8: Tenniel’s Alice meeting the Caterpillar

129

Fig. 9: Tenniel’s colored illustration of Alice meeting the caterpillar from The Nursery Alice

130

Fig. 10: Disney’s 1951 Alice, voiced by and designed after Kathryn Beaumont, meeting the

Caterpillar

131

Fig. 11: William Sterling’s 1972 Alice, played by Fiona Fullerton, meeting the Caterpillar

133

Fig. 15 (above) and 16 (below): Nick Willing’s 2009 Alice, played by Caterina Scorsone, meets

the Caterpillar

134

Fig. 17 (above) and 18 (below): Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice, played by Mia Wasikowski meeting

the Caterpillar

135

Fig. 19 (top), 20 (middle) and 21 (bottom), Once Upon A Time In Wonderland’s Alice meets the

Caterpillar

136

Fig.

22: Tumblr user Sedgewina’s illustration of Alice meeting the Caterpillar

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Appendix B

Fig. 1: List of Alice Adaptations in Film and on the Stage

; most frequently referenced in the

survey adaptions appear in bold

Title Year Format Description

Alice in Wonderland 1903 Silent film,

black and

white

Directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy

Stow; first film adaptation of Alice.

Only one, incomplete copy still in

existence

Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland

1910 Silent film,

black and

white

Directed by Edwin S. Porter, 10

minutes long

Alice in Wonderland 1915 Silent film,

black and

white

Directed by W.W.Young

Alice Comedies 1923-

1927

Animated

cartoons

Directed and produced by Walt

Disney before he owned his own

company, now in the public domain –

largely notable at the time for

innovations in animation, now

remembered for connection to Disney

Alice in Wonderland 1931 Black and

white film

Directed by Bud Pollard, first talkie

production of Alice. Released a year

before the centenary of Lewis

Carroll’s birth; not very successful.

Produced by Metropolitan Studios

Alice in Wonderland 1933 Black and

white film

Directed by Norman Z. McLeod. The

earliest Alice adaptation to still be in

circulation, featuring an all-star cast,

nonetheless a box office flop.

Distributed by Paramount Pictures

Betty in Blunderland 1934 Black and

white

cartoon

Directed by Dave Fleischer; a seven-

minute short forming part of the

Betty Boop series. Distributed by

Paramount Pictures.

The decision which adaptations to include in this list stems from the adaptations listed by

survey respondents as well as notable adaptations listed in secondary sources. The information

on adaptations, i.e. year of release and director, is largely gained from tumblr user

Phantomwise’s entries on the subject the Wikipedia entry entitled “Films and television

programmes based on Alice in Wonderland” as well as further articles on each of the films.

While not necessarily a reliable source, Wikipedia does contain the most complete list of

adaptations. Additionally, the fact that anyone can and does edit Wikipedia articles means that

Alice fans are more likely to have had an impact in the creation of this list.

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Alice au pays des merveilles 1949 Film with

stop-motion

animation

sequenes

Directed by Dallas Bower and released

in Europe; there was a British edition

in English language but Disney sued

to prevent it being released too closely

in time to their own animated film.

The films were released to U.S.

audiences at the same time; neither did

well.

Alice in Wonderland 1951 Animated

musical

film

Directed by Clyde Geronimi,

Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske,

produced by Walt Disney

Productions. All-star cast of voice

actors. A box office flop, but

remained popular due to continued

presence on broadcast television.

The New Alice in Wonderland

(or, What’s a Nice Kid Like

You Doing in a Place Like

This?)

1966 Animated

TV-movie

Directed by Alex Lovy, produced by

Hanna-Barbara Productions. Rarely

broadcast and not available in retail

Alice in Wonderland 1966 BBC

television

play

Directed by Jonathan Miller, a rarity

in that it avoids adherence to

Tenniel’s illustrations. Included

many famous stage actors and had

music by Ravi Shankar; distributed

by the BBC

Alice of Wonderland in Paris 1966 Film Directed by Norman Z. McLeod. The

earliest Alice adaptation to still be in

circulation, nonetheless a box office

flop. Distributed by Paramount

Pictures

Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland

1972 Musical

film

Directed by William Sterling,

produced in Great Britain. Won

several BAFTAs and is still in

circulation, though it has not been

refurbished and is thus of lower

technical quality; a favorite among

the Carrollians, though not critically.

Alice in Wonderland, an X-

rated Musical Comedy

1976 Adult

film/musical

Directed by Bud Townsend and

produced by Bill Osco, the first

producer of mainstream adult movies.

Eventually bought by 20

Century

Fox and edited to obtain an R rating;

still available in retail.

Alice ou la derniere fugue 1977 Film Directed by Claude Chabrol, a loose

adaptation tending more towards

horror and an adult audience.

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Jabberwocky 1977 Film Directed by Terry Gilliam and

produced by Python Studios, this

fantasy film received mixed but

mostly positive reviews and was

based entirely on the poem “The

Jabberwocky”

Alice in Wonderland 1981 Animated

film

Original title Alisa v Strane Chudes, a

USSR production, with 1982 follow-

up Alisa v Zazerkale

Alice at the Palace 1982 Film of

stage

musical

Directed by Emile Ardolino, filmed

version 1981 stage musical Alice in

Concert, written by Elizabeth

Swados, starring Meryl Streep

Alice in Wonderland 1983 Film of

Broadway

stage

production

Directed by Kirk Browning and

starring Kate and Richard Burton, the

videotaping of this performance was

conducted in a studio and formed a

part of the PBS Great Perfomances

series

Dreamchild 1985 Film Directed by Gavin Miller and

produced in the UK, a film focusing

on Carroll’s relationship with Alice

Liddell with flashback sequences

showing scenes from Alice.

Alice in Wonderland 1986 TV

Miniseries

Four 30-minute episodes written and

directed by Barry Letts, broadcasted

by the BBC

Alice Through the Looking-

Glass

1987 Animated

film

Directed by Andrea Bresciani and

Richard Slapczyniski, the only

adaptation to focus solely on Through

the Looking-Glass. Produced by

Burbank Films Australia.

Alice in Wonderland 1988 Animated

film

Directed by Rich Trueblood and

produced by Burbank Films

Australia, a tie-in to the previously

released Alice Through the Looking-

Glass.

Alice (Nêco z Alenky) 1988 Film with

stop-motion

animation

sequences

Directed by Jan Swankmajer, a

somewhat darker, more surrealist

take on Alice. One of the few Alice

adaptations received well by critics.

Produced by Channel Four Films.

Adventures in Wonderland 1992-

1995

Musical TV

series

A Disney Channel original

production based on the 1951 movie,

now with live-action instead of

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animation. The original run was

composed of 100 episodes.

Alice in Wonderland 1995 Japanese

animated

film

Directed by Toshiyuki Hiruma

Takashi, direct-to-video short film

musical adaptation of Alice.

Alice in Wonderland 1999 Television

film

Directed by Nick Willing, this two-

part TV special featured an all-star

cast and received four Emmys.

Broadcast on NBC, a subsidiary of

Comcast (in turn owned by GE).

(Full description below)

Phoebe in Wonderland 2008 Film Directed by Daniel Barnz,

independent film produced by Red

Envelope Entertainment about a girl

with Tourette’s syndrome appearing

in a school production of Alice in

Wonderland

Alice 2009 Television

Miniseries

Directed by Nick Willing, released

first in Canada and then on the

SyFy channel (owned by NBC, see

above). A darker and “more adult”

adaptation of the source material,

more closely related to science

fiction. At the time it was the most-

watched show on SyFy, though it

received mediocre reviews

critically. (Full description below)

Malice in Wonderland 2009 Film Directed by Simon Fellows and

distributed by Sony, a dark version in

which Wonderland is full of crime

and corruption. Not widely known,

those reviews it did receive were not

good.

Wonderland 2009 Musical Written by Frank Wildhorn and Jack

Murphy, specifically for the Tampa

Bay/Houston scene and only

produced on Broadway in 2013.

Received mixed critical reviews

Alice in Wonderland 2010 Film with

CGI

animation

Directed by Tim Burton, this

version has an adult Alice in an

adult Wonderland as a savior;

adapted to create more classic

fantasy stakes and tropes. Won a

number of awards including two

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Oscars and did very well at the box

office; critically received fairly

mixed reviews. (full description

below)

Alice in Murderland 2010 Film Directed by Dennis Devine, a low

budget horror film taking place at an

Alice-themed costume party that

received uniformly terrible reviews.

Nonetheless has a fan following.

Once Upon a Time in

Wonderland

2013-

2014

TV series A tie-in to another ABC (a subsidiary

of Disney) series, Once Upon a Time,

this show follows the same logic,

which is that the characters and

universes of multiple Disney movies

connect to one another. Cancelled

after one season – poor rating despite

decent reviews.

Sherlock Through the Looking

Glass

2013 Stage play Written and directed by Gus Krieger,

received poor reviews and has not

been widely adapted.

Then She Fell 2014 Theater

performance

Directed by Zach Morris, Tom

Pearson, and Jennine Willet; and

immersive performance piece taking

place in New York until the end of

2014.

Red Kingdom Rising 2014 Film Horror film centering on repressed

child abuse with themes and

characters from Alice as symbol

thereof directed and produced by

Navin Dev, received decent reviews

but has yet to make an American

debut.

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Descriptions of relevant adaptations

1. Alice in Wonderland (1999) (Dir. Nick Willing)

Nick Willing’s first foray into adapting Alice, this television movie is notable for its

attention to detail and faithfulness to the books. As a consequence of this and the format it was

produced in – a Hallmark entertainment product – the target becomes a family audience. This is

evident perhaps most obviously in that the protagonists remains a child; the more adult-oriented

2009 and 2010 versions cast Alice as an adult. It also evident in that what effort is made to write

in an overarching plot into Carroll’s episodic tale is significantly less dramatic and

overwhelming than it is in the more adult versions.

Alice appears at least several years older than the book’s seven years, and, much like

Disney’s Alice, she is on a quest. It is not to find the White Rabbit though; rather she

consistently claims to be searching for the beautiful garden she saw through the small door just

after falling down the rabbit hole, but is unable to access at first. The search for this garden

becomes her talking point with most of the characters she encounters, though it quickly becomes

evident she is looking for it primarily as a place to hide. The driving “plot” of the movie is Alice

overcoming her stage fright and being able to perform at her parents’ garden party; translating

Carroll’s poetry into song and featuring most of Wonderland as performers of some sort. The

movie culminates in her overcoming her anxieties and standing up in the trial of the Knave of

Hearts, choosing to grow larger by eating the mushrooms she still had from the run-in with the

Caterpillar, not involuntarily growing as she does in the book. When asked by the White Rabbit,

she says “Yes, I am confident”, to which the Rabbit replies, “Then you don’t need us anymore”,

clearly stating the theme of the movie.

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2. Alice (2009) (Dir. Nick Willing)

The basic idea of Wonderland Willing presents in this 2009 miniseries is that, much as in the

real world, 150 years have passed and Wonderland has developed a market economy based

literally on the opiate of the masses. The Queen of Hearts runs a casino in which the Walrus and

the Carpenter, refigured as research scientists, drain the positive emotions inspired by winning

from kidnapped humans from the real world they refer to as Oysters. These emotions are then

bottled and sold. During an exposition sequence fairly early on, Hatter, who figures as both a

guide and a love interest for Alice, explains that the Queen “controls people with a quick fix”. In

the same sequence, one of the many uses for the iconic poetry from the books is revealed; in

order to gain access to the resistance headquarters, Hatter and the gatekeeper, presumably a

stand-in for a figure from the library sequence in the book, recite lines from “How Doth the

Little Crocodile”. Coming hot on the heels of Hatter’s revelation that the Alice of the books, who

in this version was also real and brought “the whole house of cards tumbling down” during her

visit, this showcasing of the changing function the verse has serves as a nod towards the

adaptation of Carroll’s source material; the once silly and frivolous poetry becomes a symbol for

the resistance to oppression. With many of the book’s most iconic lines and moments, the

adaptation reappropriates them in far more sinister contexts. For example, the March Hare,

known for readers of the book only in conjunction with Hatter, is now the Queen’s assassin –

whom she had executed, and is now brought back to life as a sort of cyborg. The connection

between Hatter and March Hare remains largely unexplored, but towards the end of the third act,

whilst being tortured by March Hare, Hatter spouts out a series of quotes from the Mad Tea

Party, without context and relevant to nothing except the meta-text of Alice as a cultural

institution. The subtle references continue throughout as a sort of easter egg for Alice veterans,

144

e.g. naming the kidnapped people “oysters” and the scientists the Walrus and the Carpenter,

Alice’s insistence that Jack (the Knave of Hearts, also a love interest) is innocent in an entirely

different context than the book’s trial (though there is a trial), and the Dormouse’s tendency

towards falling asleep in the cumulative minute and a half he is on screen. As with many

adaptations, it is watchable without the background knowledge provided by familiarity with the

source material, but it is assumed there will be background knowledge. The key characters and

iconic lines must pop up, not necessarily because they serve a narrative purpose but because

“these are regarded as iconic elements without which the story would seem lacking” (Brooker

205).

Willing’s 2009 Alice herself is not the Alice of the books, a key departure. The question of

identity is always central in an Alice adaptation as the caterpillar must always ask who she is; in

the book, she “hardly know[s]” because she has “changed several times” (Carroll 49) that day,

referring to her multiple changes in size. In the 1951 Disney movie and Willing’s 1999 Hallmark

movie, both simply adaptations of the books rather than continuations, this portion of dialogue is

repeated almost verbatim. In Tim Burton’s 2010 film, something of a sequel, Alice is also grown

up, but she is the same Alice and must convince the denizens of Wonderland (here Underland)

and, more importantly, herself that she had been there as a little girl. Willing’s Alice on the other

hand is a martial arts instructor from the present day. Her name often causes a reference to the

“Alice of legend”, but unlike Burton’s Alice, this does not mean she is expected to fulfill a

prophecy of any sort. Instead, as the plot slowly reveals, she was scouted out by Jack, part of a

political resistance to his mother, the Queen of Hearts, because the Carpenter is her father who

went missing ten years prior. He then gave her the ring which activates the Looking Glass portal

between worlds, and hoped to start a coup. The shift away from Alice simply as the point-of-

145

view character introducing a new world to Alice as a pawn of sorts in a greater political game

marks two major departures from most adaptations. For one, this version of the Alice story enters

Wonderland through the Looking-Glass. Most other adaptations enters it through the Rabbit

Hole; this posits that Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world are one and the same.

146

3. Alice in Wonderland (2010) (Dir. Tim Burton)

Alice escapes a proposal she is disinclined to accept, and follows the White Rabbit down the

Rabbit-Hole and into Wonderland, following the standard sequence of events almost up until her

third size change, at which point it is revealed she is being watched. She runs into a whole host

of mixed Wonderland and Looking-Glass creatures in the forest, who claim she is destined to

slay the Jabberwocky. Through a lengthy exposition, the audience learns the Red Queen took the

throne from the White Queen and rules over Wonderland (apparently incorrectly titled by Alice,

actually Underland) as a tyrant. The Red Queen is actually a melding of the Red Queen from the

books and the Queen of Hearts, having mostly metallic card figures as her soldiers, while the

White Queen, who rarely appears in adaptations, has chess pieces. The denouement of the film

features Alice accepting that she is not dreaming up Wonderland – and didn’t as a child – and

accepting her fate of slaying the Jabberwocky. Afterwards, she returns to the real world,

spurning Hatter as a love interest, and proceeds to confront all of her fears and take on a position

in her Father’s shipping industry, rejecting the role society gave her. A sequel is slated for 2016.

147

Appendix C

Non-Film Adaptations

1. The Looking Glass Wars

Frank Beddor’s Looking Glass Wars “unabashedly challenges” (Looking Glass Wars) Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland. In this young adult trilogy, the first part of which was published in

2006, Alice Liddell is really Alyss Heart, who is pushed through the pool of tears from

Wonderland into the real world, and is adopted by the Liddell family. She was sent there to

escape the brutal civil war in Wonderland, and after telling Lewis Carroll, a family friend, about

her troubles, she is disgusted to see them turned into a children’s book. Eventually, she returns to

Wonderland, and the remainder of the first book covers her return to Wonderland and ascent as

queen. The further parts of the series show first an attack of the red queen on Alyss’s monarchy

and then a failure of imagination. Imagination is here the source of power, political and military

– Alyss, having the strongest imagination, vanquishes her enemies. The characters are recast as

figures within a military operation; “hatter” and “cat” both become codenames for assassins.

The books spawned a series of graphic novels centered on the Mad Hatter, who is here Alyss’s

chief military advisor with a mysterious past. There are also a number of games, physical, online

and for mobile devices; the franchise has proven fairly popular.

148

2. American McGee’s Alice

American McGee’s 2000 Alice is a video game with elements of horror published by

Electronic Arts. The game is set up as a sequel to Lewis Carroll’s books, in which Alice’s house

burned down with her family inside, and as a consequence she was put in an insane asylum.

Here, she is brought back into Wonderland as a teenager to save it (though it is implied she is

also saving herself from insanity). The game takes the form of a series of battles against the

various characters from Wonderland, and by defeating them, Alice hopes to regain her sanity and

freedom. Much like the books, the game follows a series of settings in which Alice battles a

character, though they are all created in a much darker imagining of the worlds. There is a

second part as well, with a third in production.

Bard College Institutional Review Board

PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504-5000 Phone 845-758-6822

Date: November 11, 2013

To: Helen Bendix

Cc: Deirdre D’Albertis and Diana Brown

From: Michelle Murray

Re: Reshaping Alice in Wonderland

DECISION: APPROVED

Dear Helen,

The Bard Institutional Review Board reviewed your proposal at our November meeting. Your

proposal is approved through November 11, 2014.

Please notify the IRB if your methodology changes, or unexpected events arise.

We wish you the best of luck with your research.

Michelle Murray

mkmurray@bard.edu

IRB Chair